Egan Hughes Books in Order

Egan Hughes was born in North Devon and grew up in Southsea, Hampshire, with the coast never far away. She wanted to write novels from childhood, but like plenty of writers she took the long road to publication, building a working life in marketing and copyediting before fiction became the thing she kept circling back to.

That day-job experience probably helped. Copy work asks for precision, pace, and an ear for what a sentence is really doing, and Hughes later brought that same control to suspense. Her stories are cleanly built, but they are also very interested in the messy stuff underneath, especially what happens when trust slips and a relationship starts to turn.

The real shift came when she left marketing work and went sailing. Time on the water gave her space to think, and it gave her material. She has said that this period made her feel properly inspired to write, and it fed directly into the closed-in, high-pressure atmosphere of her first novel.

The sea matters here.

Hughes has said she first tried to write lighter women's fiction, but her plots kept drifting toward danger. What interested her was not the tidy happy ending, but the dark side of romance, the point where charm becomes control, or where love starts to look a lot like manipulation. That focus gives her books their edge. She writes about secrets, coercive control, shame, and the way smart people can still be pulled into bad situations.

Her debut novel, One That Got Away, began life as a manuscript called Deep Water. Before publication it was shortlisted for the First Novel Prize and the 2017 Richard and Judy Search for a Bestseller competition. When the finished novel reached readers in 2020, it went on to be shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger. The book moves between the Mediterranean and the UK, turning a dreamy boating escape into a tense story about toxic love, trauma, and revenge.

Readers who come to Hughes for atmosphere often move straight to Leave the Lights On. This time the trap is a remote smart home rather than a boat, and the danger is wired into everyday life, the lights, locks, cameras, and app-controlled systems that are meant to make a home feel safe. Lauren, the novel's central character, is already carrying trauma, so every strange incident comes with an extra layer of doubt. Is the house malfunctioning, is someone targeting her, or is the past pushing its way back in?

She likes putting ordinary women in very bad situations.

What makes the books work for many readers is that the twists are not just mechanical. Hughes tends to start with a strong 'what if' idea and a woman with a problem, then keeps adding pressure through clashing motives and half-hidden truths. Even when her plots turn sharply, the engine is emotional. Fear, longing, embarrassment, denial, and the slow realization that the wrong person has too much power do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Away from the page, she has described herself as happiest near the sea and in the countryside, and she has spoken warmly about dogs and the forced writing breaks that come with taking them for walks. More recently she has also published under her own name, Carrie Hughes. She lives in West Sussex, works as a copywriter and guest lecturer in creative writing, and still writes suspense centered on women who are tougher than they first appear.