CL Taylor Books in Order

If you want to start with her breakthrough thrillers: The Accident / Before I Wake → The Lie → The Missing
If you like isolated, high-tension suspense: Sleep → The Island → Her Last Holiday
If you want domestic danger and revenge plots: The Escape → The Fear → The Guilty Couple
If you'd rather try her earlier Cally Taylor books first: Heaven Can Wait → Home for Christmas → Secrets and Rain

CL Taylor, who also writes as Cally Taylor, was born in Worcester and spent much of her childhood moving between army bases in the UK and Germany. That unsettled start makes a strange kind of sense when you look at her fiction. Her books often begin in ordinary places, then pull the ground away from under people.

At Northumbria University she studied psychology, graduating in 1995. She has said she was especially drawn to abnormal and criminal psychology, and that background later fed into the fears, obsessions, manipulations, and bad choices that power her thrillers. The science never takes over the stories, but you can feel her interest in how people think, panic, lie, and justify things to themselves.

Before novels took over, Taylor had a string of day jobs in graphic design, web development, instructional design, and e-learning. After university she lived in London for two years, then spent thirteen years in Brighton, where writing gradually shifted from something she hoped to do to something she did seriously.

She started with short stories.

In 2005 she began writing them in earnest, and the next year she won the Helen Mullin and Bank Street Writers short story competitions. In 2006, after a close friend from school died suddenly, she decided to stop waiting for the perfect moment and write a novel. Her first books, published as Cally Taylor, were Heaven Can Wait and Home for Christmas. They are warmer, more romantic stories, with comedy, heart, and a touch of magic. Home for Christmas was later adapted as a feature film, and her collection Secrets and Rain gathered more of her earlier work.

Then she turned darker.

While on maternity leave in 2012, Taylor moved into psychological suspense and began publishing as C.L. Taylor. The Accident, released in 2014 and published in the US as Before I Wake, became her breakout thriller. She followed it with The Lie, The Missing, The Escape, The Fear, Sleep, Strangers, Her Last Holiday, and The Guilty Couple. She has also written young adult thrillers, including The Treatment and The Island. Many of these books are standalones, which makes them easy to jump into, but together they show how quickly she found her lane: tight chapters, high personal stakes, and protagonists who are often frightened, isolated, and not sure whom to trust.

What readers tend to like about Taylor's books is how recognisable the setups feel. A missing teenager. A coercive ex. A remote hotel. A wellness retreat. A family in trouble. Then the pressure starts building. In books like Sleep, Strangers, and Her Last Holiday, she takes familiar worries and pushes them just far enough to feel frighteningly possible. Her novels keep coming back to guilt, female friendship, stalking, cult-like control, family secrets, and the way fear can push decent people into messy decisions. Even when the plots turn twisty, the emotions usually stay grounded in everyday life.

Taylor now lives in Bristol with her partner and son, and she writes full time. Her books have sold more than two million copies in the UK, been translated into more than thirty languages, and picked up several major book club selections. In 2024, Northumbria awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters. It is a neat full-circle moment for a writer whose work still shows the mix of psychology, curiosity, and plain old page-turning energy that first brought readers to her.