Dan Smith Books in Order

If you want spooky village mysteries: The Invasion of Crooked Oak → The Beast of Harwood Forest → The Horror of Dunwick Farm → The Terror of Hilltop House
If you like survival adventures: Boy X → Below Zero → Big Game
If you want history with danger and heart: My Friend the Enemy → My Brother's Secret → She Wolf
If you want darker adult thrillers: Dry Season → Dark Horizons → The Child Thief → Red Winter → The Darkest Heart

Dan Smith was born in 1970, and his early life seems to have given him two very different educations at once. On one side there was a traditional English boarding school. On the other there was travel, long stretches of it, with his family. He has said he grew up living three lives, schoolboy, traveler, and storyteller. That last one stuck.

Those travels took him far beyond Britain. Over the years he lived in Sierra Leone, Sumatra, northern and central Brazil, Spain, and the Soviet Union. You can feel that in his fiction. His books rarely sit still, and place is never just scenery. Rivers, forests, ice, villages, and rough borders all press in on the people moving through them.

He never really stopped writing.

Before novels became his job, Smith worked plenty of others. He has described stints as a dishwasher, a social security fraud detection officer, someone who worked on giant Christmas decorations, and a collection of everyday office jobs. Through all of that, he kept writing stories. When his first adult novel, Dry Season, appeared in 2010, it brought together several things that would become trademarks, far-flung settings, people under moral pressure, and danger that feels close enough to touch.

The adult books that followed kept stretching across the map. Dark Horizons heads to Sumatra and follows a traveler into a community that looks like paradise until it clearly is not. The Child Thief and Red Winter move into harsher historical terrain, with cold landscapes, violence, and characters trying to hold on to their humanity. The Darkest Heart returns to Brazil and to one of Smith's recurring interests, what happens when someone wants to escape a violent life but the world will not let go.

Then he started writing for younger readers, and the shift makes a lot of sense. The pace was always there. So was the sense of jeopardy. Books like My Friend the Enemy, My Brother's Secret, Boy X, Below Zero, and She Wolf take those strengths and sharpen them for younger audiences. Some are historical, some are survival adventures, some lean into sci-fi or horror, but they all trust readers to handle fear, uncertainty, and difficult choices.

History matters to him.

That shows up especially in the wartime books. Smith has spoken about a family interest in the Second World War, including a great-aunt who was a flak gunner and a grandfather who was an army captain. In My Friend the Enemy and My Brother's Secret, history is not a backdrop added for color. It shapes the children at the center of the story and forces them to ask hard questions about loyalty, duty, and compassion. Even his scarier books work like that. In the Crooked Oak stories and The Night House Files, the thrills are real, but so is the pressure on ordinary children to decide what kind of people they want to be.

His children's fiction has earned a loyal audience of its own. Boy X won the Essex Book Award, the Phoenix Book Award, and the Coventry Inspiration Book Award, and other books have been shortlisted or longlisted for major children's prizes. He also does school visits, which feels fitting for a writer whose books are built to be passed from hand to hand in a burst of excitement.

Smith lives in Newcastle with his wife and two children, and he writes for both adults and younger readers. That double track suits him. Whether he is writing about Brazil, wartime Europe, an Antarctic outpost, or a village full of bad secrets, the pull is similar, vivid places, ordinary people pushed to their limits, and stories that keep moving. He writes adventure, but he rarely forgets the human cost of it.