Alice LaPlante Books in Order

If you want the breakout novel: Turn of Mind → A Circle of Wives
If you like relationship-driven suspense: A Circle of Wives → Half Moon Bay
If you want a darker coming-of-age story: Coming of Age at the End of Days
If you want publication order: Turn of Mind → A Circle of Wives → Coming of Age at the End of Days → Half Moon Bay

Alice LaPlante grew up in Chicago, and she came to fiction after a long stretch spent working with words in other forms. Before most readers knew her as a novelist, she had already built a life as a journalist, editor, and teacher. That background matters. Her novels are tense and psychological, but they are also unusually precise about how people think, evade, and remember.

She came to fiction late, but not unprepared.

For more than twenty years, LaPlante taught creative writing at Stanford and in San Francisco State's MFA program. She was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. Alongside the teaching, she wrote nonfiction, edited bestselling books for other writers, and worked as an editorial consultant, especially with technology companies. She has said that journalism taught her to be direct, concise, and accurate, and you can feel that discipline all through her fiction.

Her breakout novel, Turn of Mind, grew out of something deeply personal. LaPlante has spoken about her mother's Alzheimer's and about how hard it was to approach that material on the page. Then her partner challenged her to try writing a mystery, and the idea unlocked the book. The result was a novel about Dr. Jennifer White, a former surgeon with dementia who may have killed her best friend. It became a bestseller and won the Wellcome Book Prize.

It did not feel like a cautious debut.

The novels that followed kept that same interest in pressure, secrecy, and inner fracture. A Circle of Wives starts with the death of a celebrated plastic surgeon and the discovery that he had three wives in three cities. Coming of Age at the End of Days shifts to a sixteen-year-old girl pulled toward a doomsday cult while trying to make sense of depression, faith, and belonging. Half Moon Bay follows a grieving mother who moves to the California coast for a fresh start, only to find herself caught in a town rattled by missing children. The setups change, but LaPlante keeps asking similar questions about identity, obsession, and what people hide from one another.

That mix is a big part of why readers stick with her. She likes suspense, but she is usually less interested in clever puzzle mechanics than in why a person breaks, lies, clings, or turns away. Her books return again and again to grief, memory, marriage, shame, desire, and the strange bargains people make just to keep going. Even when there is a murder or disappearance at the center, the emotional damage around it is what really drives the story.

Place matters in her work, too. Northern California shows up often, not as postcard scenery but as atmosphere: quiet neighborhoods, academic worlds, coastal towns, private grief hidden behind orderly lives. That setting fits her well. She is drawn to places that look settled from the outside and turn out to be full of fault lines.

She has also written books about writing itself, including The Making of a Story, and that practical teacherly side has never really left her. Even in interviews, she tends to talk less about grand artistic mystique and more about structure, voice, and finding the right entry point into difficult material. These days she lives with her family in Mallorca, Spain, and still moves between fiction, teaching, and consulting. It makes sense. Her career has never stayed in one lane for long.