Emily Lloyd Jones Books in Order

If you want Welsh folklore and monsters: The Bone Houses → The Drowned Woods → The Wild Huntress
If you like superpowers and criminal crews: Illusive → Murder on the Disoriented Express → Deceptive
If you want a cozy-creepy middle grade story: Unseen Magic → Unspoken Magic
If you prefer dark contemporary fantasy: The Hearts We Sold

Emily Lloyd Jones grew up on a vineyard in rural Oregon, where evergreen forests were part of daily life and sheep apparently left a lasting impression. That backdrop matters. Her fiction often feels close to woods, weather, old stories, and the sense that something strange is waiting just past the tree line.

She has a BA in English from Western Oregon University and a MA in publishing from Rosemont College. Before her novels started reaching shelves, she worked as a bookseller and children's buyer at an independent shop in Mendocino, California. She was reading widely, watching what young readers actually reached for, and learning the practical side of the book world at the same time. It is easy to see that background in how cleanly her stories move and how clearly she understands audience.

Her first novel, Illusive, was published in 2014. It begins with a post-pandemic world where a vaccine has left some people with powers, and its heroine, Ciere Giba, is both a shape-shifter and a thief. The follow-up, Deceptive, and the bridge novella Murder on the Disoriented Express keep that same energy: superpowers, criminal jobs, government pressure, and alliances that never feel completely safe. Readers who like fast plots and morally messy teams usually do well there.

Then she pivoted.

In The Hearts We Sold, Lloyd Jones takes a demon bargain and turns it into a story about survival, control, and the price of getting out of a bad situation. With The Bone Houses, she moved into darker folklore, following a teen gravedigger through a Welsh-inspired landscape haunted by the walking dead. That book became an Indie bestseller, and it is easy to see why it stuck with people. It has monsters, yes, but it is just as interested in grief, family duty, and the quiet ways people carry loss.

Her newer books keep moving across subgenres without losing her core interests. The Drowned Woods uses Welsh folklore and heist structure to tell a story about revenge, freedom, and a damaged crew trying to do one impossible thing. The Wild Huntress turns to a deadly magical competition full of monsters, court politics, and uneasy alliances. Augusta Pine Does Not Exist shifts into near-future thriller territory with a teen hacker forced into covert work. On the surface those books look very different. Underneath, they are all interested in identity, power, and what it costs to be used by a system bigger than you.

The settings change. The pressure on her characters does not.

Across her work, a few things keep resurfacing: hidden magic, bad bargains, found family, and young people who have been cornered, underestimated, or treated like tools. Even when the setup is fantastical, the emotions are plain and recognizable. Fear. Guilt. Longing. The slow business of learning who to trust. She likes big hooks, but she usually ties them to questions of belonging, autonomy, and what a person owes the people they love.

Her middle grade books, Unseen Magic and Unspoken Magic, show the same strengths in a gentler key. Set in the magical town of Aldermere, they follow Fin and her friends through vanishing tea shops, ravens, bigfoots, and the very real weight of anxiety. These books are lighter on the surface, but they are not slight. They still care about memory, fear, friendship, and the hard work of feeling at home in your own life. You can see the bookseller instinct there too: the fantasy is imaginative, but the feelings are easy to grasp.

Lloyd Jones now lives in Northern California, where she has said she enjoys wandering in redwood forests. That feels fitting. Her books often have that same pull: a path into the woods, a rumor that might be true, and a main character who keeps going even when the map gets strange.