Abby Mullen Thrillers Books in Order

The Abby Mullen Thrillers follow a New York City hostage negotiator who has spent her life trying to outrun a childhood shaped by a violent cult. The series begins with A Deadly Influence and continues through Damaged Intentions and A Burning Obsession, each book tying a fresh crisis to the wounds Abby carries from the Wilcox compound.

As a child, Abby survived a massacre set off by cult leader Moses Wilcox, a fire that killed her parents and many others. Years later she teaches crisis negotiation for the NYPD, raising her own family and pretending the past is firmly behind her. Her skills are cool headed and precise, but her sense of safety is fragile.

In A Deadly Influence, that past comes roaring back when Eden Fletcher, a fellow survivor she has not spoken to in years, calls in a panic. Eden’s young son has been kidnapped, and the ransom demand quickly explodes into a public spectacle thanks to the boy’s older sister and her online following. Abby leads a joint team of local police and federal agents, all while trying to understand why someone would target Eden and what the crime has to do with the cult they both escaped.

Damaged Intentions raises the stakes even further. An armed group of conspiracy theorists who call themselves the Watchers storms a New York high school and takes hostages. Among them is Abby’s own daughter. Abby suddenly finds herself negotiating not just for strangers but for her child, facing people whose worldview has been warped by fringe beliefs and online echo chambers. The operation peels back new layers of the Wilcox story and shows how deeply his ideas still infect vulnerable minds.

In A Burning Obsession, a string of deadly house fires looks less like coincidence and more like a campaign. Abby recognizes echoes of the inferno that destroyed the compound where she grew up. To stop the arsonist she teams up with FBI profiler Zoe Bentley, whose experience with obsessive killers offers a different lens on Wilcox and his followers. Together they trace the pattern behind the fires and confront the man Abby has feared for decades.

Across the trilogy, the books mix tense negotiation scenes with investigations into cult psychology, domestic extremism, and the ripple effects of childhood trauma. Abby’s home life, her relationships with her ex husband and children, and her uneasy role as both victim and rescuer all feed into the choices she makes on the job.

Readers can expect high pressure set pieces, a close look at how negotiators actually work, and an ongoing question that runs through the whole series, whether Abby can finally separate who she is now from what was done to her as a child.