David Bell Books in Order
Browse David Bell books in order, with quick summaries, series links, and where-to-start tips for his family-driven suspense, campus thrillers, and YA mysteries.
Last updated: June 11, 2026
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Publication Order
18 books
The Condemned
by David Bell
2008
In a city quarantined after a terror attack on the water supply, scavengers risk their lives against the violent City People who roam after dark. One guilt-ridden worker begins to suspect the nightmare around him hides an even worse truth.
The Girl in the Woods
by David Bell
2008
Diana Greene thought she had left behind her sister's disappearance, her mother's illness, and the visions that haunted her hometown. Then a woman offers answers in exchange for help finding another missing girl, pulling Diana back into buried local secrets.
Cemetery Girl
by David Bell
2011
Four years after Caitlin Stuart vanished, she comes home alive but refuses to explain where she has been. Her silence leaves her parents facing a terrible choice, and her father starts digging into truths he may not want to find.
The Hiding Place
by David Bell
2012
Twenty-five years after her little brother was murdered, Janet Manning is still haunted by what happened in the park that day. New questions about the case force her to revisit old memories and wonder if the wrong man was convicted.
Never Come Back / Gone for Good
by David Bell
2013
Elizabeth Hampton returns home after her mother's sudden death and learns it was murder. A strange name in the will and buried truths from her mother's past pull her into a dangerous family mystery.
Rides a Stranger
by David Bell
2013
After his father's funeral, literature professor Don Kurtwood is approached by a rare book dealer who hints that the man he thought he knew had a secret past. When the dealer is murdered, Don is pulled into a mystery involving a vanished pulp writer and his father's hidden life.
The Forgotten Girl
by David Bell
2014
Jason Danvers agrees to look after his troubled sister's teenage daughter for two days, then his sister vanishes. Her disappearance forces him back toward an old hometown mystery and the secrets his family has spent years avoiding.
Somebody I Used to Know
by David Bell
2015
Nick Hansen spots a young woman who looks exactly like the college girlfriend he lost in a fire twenty years earlier. When she turns up murdered with his name in her pocket, the past stops feeling buried.
Since She Went Away
by David Bell
2016
Jenna Barton has spent three months blaming herself for her best friend Celia's disappearance. When another young woman vanishes, the case reopens old guilt and exposes a chain of lies running through Jenna's closest relationships.
Bring Her Home
by David Bell
2017
After his daughter Summer disappears and is found badly injured beside her murdered friend, Bill Price waits by her hospital bed and starts doubting everything he thinks he knows. The deeper he digs, the stranger the case becomes.
Somebody's Daughter
by David Bell
2018
Michael Frazier's ex-wife arrives with shocking news: her missing ten-year-old daughter may be his child. Over one frantic night, Michael follows the trail of a girl he never knew while old lies threaten his marriage and everyone around him.
Layover
by David Bell
2019
Frequent flyer Joshua Fields shares a charged airport encounter with a stranger named Morgan, only to see her face on TV moments later as a missing woman. His search for her becomes a fast, disorienting chase through lies and false identities.
The Request
by David Bell
2020
Ryan Francis agrees to help a friend cover up an affair and instead walks into a murder scene. With his own secret hanging over him, he has to figure out who set him up before his life implodes.
Kill All Your Darlings
by David Bell
2021
English professor Connor Nye publishes a novel he did not write, stolen from a student he believes dead. When she reappears and the manuscript starts pointing toward a real campus murder, his lie becomes a trap.
She's Gone
by David Bell
2022
Hunter Gifford wakes after homecoming with no memory of a car crash and learns his girlfriend Chloe vanished from the wreck. With the town, the police, and a true-crime obsessed classmate turning on him, he has to prove he is not a killer.
The Finalists
by David Bell
2022
Six cash-strapped students enter Hyde House to compete for a prestigious scholarship. Then one of them dies, the doors stay locked, and the competition turns into a vicious campus whodunit.
Try Not to Breathe
by David Bell
2023
Former Kentucky State Police officer Avery Rogers is pushed into searching for the half sister she barely knows. What starts as a family obligation becomes a tense chase involving protests, a stalker, and a secret at the center of their family history.
Storm Warning
by David Bell
2024
Jake Powell is trying to get his family off a Florida barrier island before a hurricane hits when he finds his friend murdered. Trapped with rising winds and isolated neighbors, he realizes the storm is only one of the dangers closing in.
Where should I start?
If you want family secrets and missing-child suspense: Cemetery Girl → Bring Her Home → Somebody's Daughter
If you like small-town mysteries with buried history: The Hiding Place → The Forgotten Girl → Since She Went Away
If you want fast, high-concept thrillers: Layover → The Request → Kill All Your Darlings
If campus suspense is your thing: Kill All Your Darlings → The Finalists
If you want his YA side first: She's Gone → Try Not to Breathe
Author bio
David Bell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 17, 1969, and he grew up there in a house where reading was part of everyday life. He has said his parents were always surrounded by books, newspapers, and magazines, and that early atmosphere clearly stuck. He attended St. Catharine of Siena and St. Xavier High School, then stayed in the Midwest for college and graduate school, earning degrees from Indiana University, Miami University, and the University of Cincinnati.
Reading came first.
After college, Bell did not head straight into a polished career path. He worked a string of jobs, including bartender, bookstore clerk, telemarketer, delivery driver, and A.V. work in a library, jobs that paid the bills and still left him room to write. In his own telling, that was the point. He wanted time to figure out fiction, to write regularly, and to keep moving toward graduate study in creative writing.
The shift from wanting to write to actually building a writing life happened in his twenties, when he got serious about working every day and finishing long projects.
Short stories came first, and one of them eventually grew into The Condemned, his first published novel. A second early novel, The Girl in the Woods, kept some of that darker, horror-leaning energy. But Cemetery Girl was the book that really announced the version of David Bell many readers now know best, suspense built around families, grief, missing people, and the damage that secrets do over time.
That pattern runs through a lot of his best known work. The Hiding Place revisits a child's murder a quarter century later. The Forgotten Girl opens with a vanished sister and pulls an old hometown mystery back into the light. Bring Her Home and Somebody's Daughter both take a simple, terrifying question, what happened to the missing child, and keep worrying it until every relationship starts to crack. Bell's plots move quickly, but the engine underneath them is usually emotional.
He also likes changing the setting while keeping the pressure personal. Layover begins with an airport encounter and becomes a maze of false identities. The Request starts with a favor for a friend and spirals into murder. In Kill All Your Darlings and The Finalists, Bell brings academia onto the page, using campuses, scholarship competitions, and professor politics to show how ambition and fear can warp people who seem perfectly ordinary.
The career markers are real, but they do not feel separate from the work. Cemetery Girl won the Prix Polar International de Cognac in 2013. Kill All Your Darlings was a finalist for the Edgar Award, and She's Gone, his first young adult thriller, reached the New York Times bestseller list. What readers tend to respond to, though, is less about awards than about momentum. Bell writes the kind of books that make you say one more chapter, then quietly turns that pace into something sadder and more human.
Teaching has remained a big part of his life. He is a professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, where he co-founded the MFA program in creative writing, and he has also taught at Miami University and St. Andrews University. He has talked about writing with the kind of routine that fits around academic life, especially using summer breaks to make real progress on a draft.
Now he lives in Bowling Green with his wife, author M Hendrix. Off the page, he has mentioned rooting for the Reds and Bengals, watching movies, and walking in the cemetery near his house. That last detail feels almost too on brand, but it suits a writer who is very good at finding the unease tucked inside ordinary places.
Edited by
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