Elicia Hyder Books in Order

If you want paranormal suspense first: The Soul Summoner → The Siren → The Angel of Death
If you want the darker urban fantasy series: Detached → Specter
If you want Southern romance and redemption: To Be Her First → The Bed She Made
If you want funny, bruised-up roller derby romance: Lights Out Lucy → Britches Get Stitches
If you want extra Soul Summoner backstory later: The Detective → The Mercenary → The Archangel

Elicia Hyder grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina, and that landscape still shows up all over her fiction. The hills, small towns, and hard-edged beauty behind The Soul Summoner are not borrowed from nowhere. They are places and moods she knows.

She has never written like someone who came to stories by the neat, expected route. On her own site, Hyder describes herself as the youngest child in the family, good at school, restless almost everywhere else, and more than a little rebellious. She has also written openly about a rough stretch in her youth, including dropping her studies and spending months living in a tent in a national forest with her dogs.

Then life turned.

In the late 1990s, during a stay in rehab, a prophet told her she would write a book one day. Hyder has said that moment stayed with her. It became one of those strange personal mile markers that made more sense later than it did at the time.

Before publishing fiction, she built a working life in Nashville around tech, design, and learning as she went. She taught herself HTML while working at a megachurch, then spent years in internet and social media marketing, graphic design, and web design. That background mattered when she moved into indie publishing, because it meant she already knew how to build things from scratch and keep them moving.

Writing arrived with real urgency. In 2015, while querying agents for The Soul Summoner, Hyder was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin's lymphoma. During treatment, she self-published The Bed She Made, a contemporary novel she has said is loosely shaped by parts of her own life. The book found readers quickly, and after finishing chemo and radiation, she made the same choice with The Soul Summoner.

That decision changed things.

The Soul Summoner became her breakout and introduced many readers to the mix that now defines a lot of her work: danger, romance, banter, found family, and women trying to stay steady while the world gets strange. Books like The Siren and The Angel of Death pushed that series into a bigger supernatural canvas, while Detached opened the darker Saphera Nyx books. On a very different track, Lights Out Lucy showed how comfortably she can shift into funny, emotional contemporary romance without losing her pace.

Across genres, the same concerns keep surfacing. Hyder likes characters with messy histories. She writes a lot about second chances, grief, loyalty, faith, consequences, and the long shadow of earlier choices. Even when angels, demons, or uncanny powers show up, the emotional engine is usually very human.

Some of that comes straight from experience. Hyder has written about losing her first husband in 2008 and later joining roller derby, which would eventually feed into the Music City Rollers books. She also studied American Literature and Creative Writing at American Military University, giving formal shape to instincts she had already been sharpening for years.

Now she lives in middle Tennessee, in the Nashville area, with her husband, five children, and their dogs. She has spoken about self-publishing, built a loyal readership, and seen her work optioned for film and television. The through line, though, is simpler than that. She is a writer who learned by doing, kept going, and turned a hard, unusual life into stories with real momentum.