Avery Bishop Books in Order

If you want the best first book: Girl Gone Mad
If you prefer a missing-child mystery: One Year Gone
If you want a quick, creepy tryout: Dear Seraphina
If you want a simple three-book tour: Girl Gone Mad → One Year Gone → Dear Seraphina

Avery Bishop is the pen name Robert Swartwood uses for his psychological suspense novels. Under his own name, Swartwood has published more than a dozen books, but the Avery Bishop byline is where he leans hardest into buried guilt, unstable memory, missing people, and the kind of secrets that can wreck a life years later. The setup is usually sharp, the pressure starts early, and ordinary people end up cornered by the past.

That split in names makes sense.

Swartwood's work as Robert Swartwood ranges widely, from the assassin-led Holly Lin books to the conspiracy-heavy Man of Wax novels to standalones like The Serial Killer's Wife and The Calling. The Bishop books, though, feel a little closer to the skin. They are less about firepower and chase scenes, more about obsession, shame, grief, and the way one bad act can keep echoing for years.

He did not come to this career all at once. Long before the Avery Bishop name appeared, he was publishing short fiction and experimenting with compressed forms. He coined the term hint fiction for stories of 25 words or fewer, then edited the anthology Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer. That side of his career still shows in his novels. Even when the books are full length, the chapters move quickly, the hooks land cleanly, and he knows how to end a scene at exactly the right moment.

He has also said that, for years, writing happened around a regular day job, often late at night when the house was finally quiet. That practical, keep-going approach fits the books themselves. They are built to pull you forward. There is very little wandering around.

Readers feel that pace.

If you start with Girl Gone Mad, you get a good sense of what the Avery Bishop name promises. The novel follows therapist Emily Bennett as a cruel middle-school past comes roaring back, and it uses guilt and memory as engines for suspense. One Year Gone shifts to a mother's search for her missing daughter and adds small-town suspicion, grief, and the fear that the people meant to help may be part of the danger. Dear Seraphina shows the shorter, stranger side of the byline, turning fan letters and celebrity fixation into something quietly unnerving.

Meanwhile, Swartwood's real-name books help explain the range behind the pseudonym. The Killing Room, which won an ITW Thriller Award, opens with one of those irresistible nightmare premises, a man waking in a Las Vegas hotel room beside a dead woman. Books like No Shelter, Bullet Rain, and Hollow Point show his comfort with harder-edged thriller mechanics, while older work like Land of the Dead and New Avalon shows he has never been afraid to drift toward horror or the uncanny.

What links all of it is tension, but also feeling. Whether he is writing as Avery Bishop or Robert Swartwood, he tends to build stories around people who are haunted, trapped, hunted, or just one bad choice away from disaster. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, keeps writing under both names, and seems happiest when a clean premise opens the door to a messier human story.