Abbie Frost Books in Order

If you want the Abbie Frost novel first: The Guesthouse
If you want to start at the very beginning: Mindsight → Her Turn to Cry → Her Deadly Secret
If you like family secrets and buried pasts: All the Little Lies → The Guesthouse
If you want the latest Chris Curran novel: When the Lights Go Out

Abbie Frost is the pen name of British thriller writer Chris Curran. She was born in London and now lives in St Leonards-on-Sea on England's south coast, close enough to the water that the sea still feels like part of daily life. That mix of city roots and coastal quiet suits the books she writes, suspenseful stories that look ordinary on the surface and then start to tilt.

Books came first.

As a teenager, Curran left school at sixteen to work in her local library, which she has described as her dream job. She only stayed for a few months before returning to full-time education, but the detail tells you a lot about her. Reading was never just a hobby, it was the thing she kept circling back to.

She later earned a degree from Sussex University and worked a long list of jobs before publishing novels, including acting, script writing, copy editing and teaching. She has also reviewed fiction for magazines and blogs. All of that shows up in her work, not as autobiography, but in the way she handles dialogue, group tension and the small details that make people feel real.

She writes standalones.

Under her own name, Chris Curran has published Mindsight, Her Turn to Cry, Her Deadly Secret, All the Little Lies and When the Lights Go Out. Readers who enjoy those books usually come for the same things, family secrets, pressure-cooker situations, and characters who are carrying more guilt or fear than they first admit. Her stories are thrillers, but they are often just as interested in emotional fallout as they are in the mystery itself.

That approach is there from the start. An early draft of Mindsight was shortlisted for the Yeovil Literary Prize in 2013, and Curran has also been shortlisted twice for the CWA Margery Allingham Award. Even when the setup is dark, her books tend to avoid flashy violence and lean harder on unease, mistrust and the creeping sense that somebody is lying.

The Guesthouse, published as Abbie Frost, pushes her work into a more gothic lane. Curran has said the book grew out of her love of closed-circle mysteries from the Golden Age of crime fiction, and from seeing a crumbling Anglo-Irish mansion in County Mayo that stayed in her mind. A lecture trip on the Queen Mary 2, where she spoke about English whodunits, helped sharpen the idea into a modern locked-room thriller.

Her influences make sense once you know that background. She has spoken warmly about Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Mary Stewart and Barbara Vine, and you can feel that in novels like Her Deadly Secret and All the Little Lies, where the danger often grows out of old damage, bad choices and the stories families tell to protect themselves. Her Turn to Cry, set in the 1960s, shows another side of her writing, with period detail and morally messy characters.

These days she lives, in her own words, a stone's throw from the sea, in a small blue house with a garden full of flowers, vegetables and plenty of so-called weeds. She appears at festivals, libraries and book groups, and still seems to enjoy talking about crime fiction as much as writing it. That feels right for someone who once left school for a library job, and never really stopped building her life around books.