Emily Bleeker Books in Order

If you want the big emotional hook: When I'm Gone → The Waiting Room
If you like fast, twisty suspense: Wreckage → What It Seems
If you want small town secrets and family drama: Working Fire → What's Left Unsaid
If you prefer sweeping dual timeline stories: When We Were Enemies → When We Chased the Light → Good Days Bad Days

Emily Bleeker is from Chicago, and she still lives in the suburbs with her husband, four kids, and a kitten named Hazel. She writes suspenseful family stories that begin with a strong hook and then stay close to the people inside the crisis. That mix of page turning plot and emotional fallout sits at the center of her work.

Writing did not start for her as a neat career plan. She was working as an elementary school educator and leading writers' workshops when she began doing the same exercises alongside her students. She has said she was always a daydreamer, and writing gave those private stories somewhere to go. For years, most of that work stayed private, including some early Jane Austen fan fiction.

For a while, she was a secret writer.

The big turning point came at 25, when she had a three month old and a one year old at home and was diagnosed with an aggressive soft tissue sarcoma. Facing cancer changed her sense of time. It made her think hard about courage, risk, and what she was still waiting for. Surviving did not make life simple, but it did push her to start sharing her work instead of keeping it hidden away.

Her debut novel, Wreckage, arrived in 2015 and found readers fast with its story of plane crash survivors hiding what really happened on a deserted island. When I'm Gone, about a widower receiving letters from his late wife, followed and became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Readers often come for the mystery in those books and stay for the grief, love, and family secrets underneath.

She has also talked about being a big reader from the time she got a library card, tearing through series like The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, and books by R.L. Stine. That wide reading helps explain her range. She is comfortable moving between domestic suspense, relationship drama, and historical fiction as long as the emotional core feels true.

That range shows in books like Working Fire, about a young paramedic pulled into the mystery of her sister's shooting, The Waiting Room, about a mother whose missing baby turns her into a suspect, and What It Seems, a darker story about abuse, escape, and the gap between an online image and real life. Her books move quickly, but they stay close to emotional fallout.

The past is never very quiet in her novels.

That is especially true in What's Left Unsaid, When We Were Enemies, When We Chased the Light, and Good Days Bad Days. These stories lean harder into buried history, dual timelines, and the stories families tell, or refuse to tell, about themselves. Again and again, Bleeker returns to grief, secrecy, motherhood, identity, and the question of whether damaged people can still find a way home to each other.

Today she is a Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author whose books have reached more than two million readers. She also performs improv with a local house team in suburban Chicago, and she has said she loves a good karaoke moment too. That feels fitting. Her novels can go to dark places, but they never lose sight of warmth.