Brandi Reeds Books in Order

Brandi Reeds is a Chicago native who has spent her life in northern Illinois. She writes psychological suspense for adults and, under the name Sasha Dawn, thrillers for young adult readers. Her books keep circling the same hard things: missing people, damaged families, and the awful moment when a character realizes they may not be able to trust what they see.

She started early. Reeds has said she was writing creepy stories by the time she was seven, and suspense really clicked for her in high school after a teacher assigned Mary Higgins Clark's Where Are the Children? That book seems to have opened the door. She was hooked, and the pull toward dark, twisty fiction never really went away.

Fear became story fuel.

She has also spoken pretty openly about how fear shaped her imagination. Growing up during a time when kidnappings felt close and frightening, and later living through a turbulent family situation, she came away with a strong sense of survival that now runs through her fiction. Her protagonists are often scared, cornered, or doubted, but they keep moving.

Before publishing novels, Reeds studied English and history at Northern Illinois University and later earned an MA in writing from Seton Hill University. Her working life has never been just one thing. She has taught college English and composition, offered free writing workshops to local schools, and worked in kitchen design and cabinetry. That mix of classroom work, practical design, and storytelling helps explain why her books feel grounded even when the plots turn strange.

As Sasha Dawn, she built a young adult list that includes Oblivion, Splinter, Blink, and Panic. Oblivion was named one of the New York Public Library's best books for teens, and Blink went on to receive an Edgar Award nomination. Those books carry a lot of pressure and danger, but they also make room for teenage voices, messy feelings, and the stubborn instinct to survive.

Then came the adult thrillers.

Writing as Brandi Reeds, she moved into adult suspense with Trespassing, a tense story about Veronica Cavanaugh, failed fertility treatments, a vanished husband, and a mind that may or may not be telling the truth. She followed it with Third Party, which links a firefighter and a betrayed wife to a law student's suspicious death, and then The Day I Disappeared, a mother-daughter thriller built around an old child abduction and the memories it left behind. Even the shorter Oak Avenue hits familiar notes: a home that should feel safe, a family under strain, and a quiet sense that something is badly wrong.

She likes unstable situations and people trying to think clearly inside them.

A few patterns keep turning up across her work. Girls and women often sit at the center. So do disappearances, unreliable relationships, buried trauma, and family secrets that refuse to stay buried. Northern Illinois matters too, not just as scenery, but as a lived-in place of schools, side streets, jobs, and neighbors. Reeds has said she gets ideas from dreams, and she often writes in the very early morning, between two and seven, when the world is quiet. That feels right for these books.

She still lives in northern Illinois with her husband, daughters, and dogs. Off the page, she has mentioned reading, travel, dance, baking, and home improvement as some of the things she enjoys most. It is a grounded life, which may be exactly why her fiction is so good at showing how fast ordinary life can slip into fear.