Alice Blanchard Books in Order
Browse Alice Blanchard books in order, with quick summaries, Natalie Lockhart series notes, and simple suggestions for where to start reading.
Last updated: July 5, 2026
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Alice Blanchard books in publication order
13 books
The Stuntman's Daughter and Other Stories
by Alice Blanchard
1996
This early collection follows people in strained families and uneasy relationships as love, shame, jealousy, and loss push them toward hard choices. The stories are compact, sharp, and often dark, but they stay rooted in ordinary lives.
Darkness Peering
by Alice Blanchard
1999
Years after a girl's murder shattered Flowering Dogwood, Maine, detective Rachel Storrow faces a new disappearance that points back to the old case and possibly to her own brother. It is a tense small-town thriller about family loyalty, memory, and buried violence.
The Breathtaker
by Alice Blanchard
2003
After a tornado tears through Promise, Oklahoma, police chief Charlie Grover discovers bodies arranged to look like storm deaths. As more killings follow the path of violent weather, he must hunt a human predator in the middle of nature's chaos.
Life Sentences
by Alice Blanchard
2004
Genetic researcher Daisy Hubbard heads to California when her unstable sister Anna disappears, only to hear that a serial killer has confessed to the crime. Teaming up with detective Jack Makowski, she uncovers a case tangled with illness, obsession, and family history.
A Breath After Drowning
by Alice Blanchard
2018
Child psychiatrist Kate Wolfe is reeling from a patient's suicide when a troubled girl begins revealing things she should not know about Kate's life. The deeper Kate looks, the closer she comes to a killer and to the grief she never escaped.
Trace of Evil
by Alice Blanchard
2019
Rookie detective Natalie Lockhart is already carrying the weight of her sister's unsolved murder when a beloved teacher is killed in Burning Lake. What looks simple at first opens onto missing people, buried secrets, and a town haunted by its own past.
The Wicked Hour
by Alice Blanchard
2020
The morning after Burning Lake's wild Halloween celebration, Natalie finds an unidentified young woman dead in a dumpster. Following the victim's last steps leads her into a knot of disappearances, hidden predators, and answers about her best friend's long-ago vanishing.
The Witching Tree
by Alice Blanchard
2021
Back in Burning Lake and close to quitting the force, Natalie Lockhart is pulled into the murder of a beloved Wiccan whose death shakes the whole town. As carved curses and old secrets surface, the case turns darker and more personal.
The Shadow Girls
by Alice Blanchard
2023
With Luke Pittman in a coma and Veronica Manes' murder still unresolved, Natalie Lockhart is pulled into another brutal case in Burning Lake. Each new lead drags up old grief, older secrets, and the feeling that something wicked is still moving through the woods.
It's Me, Violet
by Alice Blanchard
2025
Psychiatrist Annie Burton's life cracks open when four bodies are found on a Connecticut beach, including the sister who vanished twenty-two years earlier. With detective Noah Rochefort, she begins pulling at a mystery tied to childhood terror and a killer from the past.
The Red-Haired Girl
by Alice Blanchard
2025
In the ruined world of Darkstep, eighteen-year-old Lily Warlander must survive deadly games run by animal-human hybrids who rule what is left of the planet. As she fights for her team, she also starts uncovering the truth about her past.
House Of Dead Things
by Alice Blanchard
2026
A young librarian is murdered in the basement of a reclusive novelist's house in Frozen Falls, Vermont, and detective Ellie Hornsby takes the case. What follows is a tense search through old crimes, family loyalties, and a house full of restless memories.
Lola Ruins Everything
by Alice Blanchard
2026
Dorian and Lola Veil are twins bound by a dark secret, and Dorian can no longer tell whether the body they buried was real or part of Lola's manipulation. When she turns her attention to a new girl, he has to stop her before things get worse.
Where to start with Alice Blanchard
If you want the Natalie Lockhart series: Trace of Evil → The Wicked Hour → The Witching Tree → The Shadow Girls
If you want a dark small-town thriller: Darkness Peering
If you want weather-driven suspense: The Breathtaker
If you like psychological and medical suspense: Life Sentences → A Breath After Drowning → It's Me, Violet
If you want to try her short fiction first: The Stuntman's Daughter and Other Stories
Alice Blanchard sub-series and character series
Natalie Lockhart books in order
Explore this seriesAlice Blanchard collections, short stories, and related book types
Standalone Alice Blanchard books

Darkness Peering
by Alice Blanchard
1999
The Breathtaker
by Alice Blanchard
2003
Life Sentences
by Alice Blanchard
2004
A Breath After Drowning
by Alice Blanchard
2018
It's Me, Violet
by Alice Blanchard
2025
The Red-Haired Girl
by Alice Blanchard
2025
House Of Dead Things
by Alice Blanchard
2026
Lola Ruins Everything
by Alice Blanchard
2026
Author bio
Alice Blanchard was born in Hyannis, Massachusetts, and grew up largely in Connecticut, where woods, farmhouses, and New England weather got under her skin early. Those places show up again and again in her fiction, not as postcards, but as lived-in landscapes full of beauty, dread, and family history.
Reading and writing were not simple for her at first. She has written about struggling in school as a child, then falling hard for stories after her father showed her an illustrated book and inspired her to write her own version of Alice in Wonderland. Her grandfather read aloud to her, let her roam his shelves, and helped make books feel warm, strange, and alive.
She decided young that she wanted to write.
She studied film at Emerson College, which fits the way many readers describe her novels, visual, tense, and sharply paced. Later, she began publishing short fiction and built her career story by story before moving into longer suspense work. Her first book, The Stuntman's Daughter and Other Stories, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction in 1996.
The move from stories to novels paid off fast. Darkness Peering, her debut novel, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and The Breathtaker became an official Today Book Club selection. She followed with Life Sentences and, years later, A Breath After Drowning, a psychological thriller that returns to one of her favorite subjects, the way private grief can twist into public danger.
Her books are thrillers, but the pulse underneath them is usually emotional.
Readers tend to come to Blanchard for atmosphere first. She likes isolated towns, uneasy families, strange weather, broken trust, and the feeling that something bad happened here long before page one. That is especially true in the Natalie Lockhart books, beginning with Trace of Evil, where a rookie detective in Burning Lake, New York, keeps running into old murders, witch lore, and the dark afterlife of small-town secrets.
Some of that darkness comes from life close at hand. Blanchard has written movingly about growing up with an artist father who lived with bipolar disorder, and about how memory, fear, and family pain can feed fiction. She has also said that a novel usually begins for her with three things, a dream, a memory, and a true story that fascinates her.
That mix helps explain why her work feels both heightened and human. Even at their most suspenseful, books like The Witching Tree, The Shadow Girls, and It's Me, Violet stay focused on damaged people trying to live with what happened to them.
Over the years her books have been published in 16 countries, but her fiction still feels rooted in the same places that shaped her early on, rural roads, old houses, thick woods, and the quiet menace of New England. She has never really stopped returning to that emotional terrain. It is where many of her best stories begin.
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