Ashley Elston Books in Order

If you love twisty YA thrillers: The Rules for Disappearing → The Rules for Breaking → This Is Our Story → The Lying Woods
If you want a fun YA rom com first: 10 Blind Dates → 10 Truths and a Dare
If you prefer adult psychological suspense: First Lie Wins → Anatomy of an Alibi

Ashley Elston writes twisty mysteries, heartfelt young adult stories, and smart psychological thrillers that are usually rooted in the heat and humidity of Louisiana. She lives in Shreveport with her husband and three sons, and often sets her fiction in small towns that feel a lot like home.

Elston grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, in a house where stories were part of daily life. Her father was an attorney, so dinner table talk often turned to court cases and clients, planting early seeds for the legal questions and courtroom pressure that show up in several of her books.

After graduating from Neville High School, she spent a year at what is now the University of Louisiana at Monroe before transferring to Louisiana State University in Shreveport. She earned a liberal arts degree there and initially imagined a more traditional path, even applying to nursing school before realizing that route was not going to work out.

Instead, Elston leaned into another long standing interest, photography. She built a successful wedding photography business that let her stay home with her boys during the week and work on weekends, documenting other people’s big days around north Louisiana.

As her children grew, that schedule became harder to manage. One frightening weekend when a son needed emergency surgery while she was booked to shoot a wedding pushed her to step back, and she decided she never again wanted to choose between work and her kids. She closed the business, took on bookkeeping for her husband’s landscaping company, and quietly started looking for a new creative outlet.

Writing slipped into that gap. During nap times she began drafting a story just to see if she could, teaching herself structure and pacing along the way. The first manuscript became her “practice book,” something she never meant to publish but that proved she could finish a novel. The next project turned into The Rules for Disappearing, though it reached readers only after dozens of agent rejections and a stubborn decision to keep trying.

The Rules for Disappearing introduced readers to Meg, a teenager shuttled through the witness protection program with a family that is quietly falling apart. Its sequel, The Rules for Breaking, follows Meg, now ready to reclaim her real name, as she and boyfriend Ethan are dragged back into danger by a ruthless enemy. Elston stayed with suspense in This Is Our Story, about a girl interning at a district attorney’s office who becomes obsessed with the case of five boys who went hunting and only four returned, and in The Lying Woods, which sends a disgraced boarding school student back to his Louisiana hometown after his father is accused of embezzlement.

Alongside these dark, twist driven stories, she also writes lighter contemporary romances. 10 Blind Dates and its companion novel 10 Truths and a Dare focus on big, boisterous extended family gatherings, holiday chaos, and the awkward joys of first love, trading murder investigations for meddling relatives, senior week mishaps, and second chances.

With First Lie Wins, Elston stepped into adult fiction, following a con artist who keeps reinventing herself for an unseen boss and finds that one carefully constructed identity has become dangerously real. The book went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick. Her later thriller Anatomy of an Alibi continues her fascination with secrets and shifting loyalties, bringing two very different women together when a murder forces them to confront what they are willing to risk for the truth.

Across all of her work, Elston returns to a few constants, close knit families, whether loving or suffocating, small Southern towns with long memories, and characters who are trying to decide who they want to be. She talks often about still feeling like a reader first, and when she is not writing she is at home in Shreveport, trading book recommendations with friends, chasing her sons’ schedules, and dreaming up the next twist.