Catherine Ryan Howard Books in Order

If you want her breakout thriller: Distress Signals → The Liar's Girl
If you like clever books about storytelling: The Nothing Man → Burn After Reading
If you want the lockdown page-turner: 56 Days
If you want her most cinematic suspense: Run Time → The Trap

Catherine Ryan Howard was born in 1982 and grew up in Grange, a suburb of Cork. She has said she wanted to be a writer from childhood, but the road there was not neat or quick. Before the thrillers, there were ordinary jobs, a lot of persistence, and a long stretch of figuring out what kind of books she most wanted to write.

She worked abroad, including time at Walt Disney World in Florida and for a travel company in the Netherlands. After returning home, she wrote Mousetrapped, a funny memoir about her Orlando stint. Traditional publishers passed, so she published it herself in 2010. That choice turned into an education, not just in writing, but in covers, formatting, marketing, and the stubborn, practical side of getting a book into readers' hands.

That DIY start mattered.

Howard followed Mousetrapped with another travel book, Backpacked, and then with Self-Printed, her clear-eyed guide to self-publishing. Somewhere in those years she also worked out a bigger truth: she loved crime fiction, and the books she most wanted to write were tense, twisty stories with ordinary people pushed into frightening situations. The idea for Distress Signals came after she read about disappearances from cruise ships, and the setting gave her first thriller its locked-in, nowhere-to-run energy.

That novel, published in 2016, gave her a real break. Distress Signals was shortlisted for the John Creasey/New Blood Dagger, and readers quickly noticed how good she is at taking a simple setup and worrying it until it turns strange. The Liar's Girl followed, pulling an old college relationship into the shadow of a serial killer, and Rewind used hidden cameras and reverse chronology to build a murder story piece by piece.

She likes traps, both literal and emotional.

Some of Howard's best-known books show how playful she can be with form. The Nothing Man turns a survivor's true-crime memoir into a cat-and-mouse game with the killer reading along. 56 Days starts with a body in a Dublin apartment and works backward through lockdown. Run Time folds horror-movie nerves into a film shoot in remote West Cork, while Burn After Reading pairs a ghostwriter with a man suspected of killing his wife. Across the books, she returns again and again to secrets, performance, obsession, and the uneasy gap between what people say and what they've done.

The recognition followed. The Liar's Girl made the Edgar shortlist, 56 Days won the An Post Irish Crime Fiction Book of the Year, and several of her books landed on major best-of-year lists. A number of her stories have been optioned for screen, and in 2026 56 Days became a television series.

What makes Howard easy to return to is the mix of sharp concepts and very human panic. Her characters are often isolated, watched, boxed in, or trying to control a story that is slipping away from them. Even when the premise is high concept, the fear feels close to everyday life.

She now lives in Dublin. By this point her name is closely linked with Irish suspense that is clever without being showy, and with thrillers that know exactly when to tighten the screw.