Emma Kavanagh Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Falling / After We Fall → Hidden → The Missing Hours
If you want a quick sampler first: The Affair → Hidden
If you like missing-person puzzles and identity twists: The Missing Hours → The Devil You Know
If you want the darkest cat-and-mouse tension: The Killer on the Wall → To Catch a Killer / A Perfect Victim

Emma Kavanagh was born and raised in South Wales, and books seem to have been part of the picture from very early on. She has written about childhood trips to Hay-on-Wye, where her parents would let her loose in the bookshops for hours. That image of a young reader disappearing into stacks of stories tells you quite a lot about the life she was heading toward. She still lives in South Wales, now with her husband and two sons.

But writing was not her first full-time career.

After earning a PhD in Psychology from Cardiff University, she set up her own consultancy business and spent years working as a police and military psychologist. Her job involved training firearms officers, command staff, specialist police teams, military personnel, and NATO personnel across the UK and Europe. That work gave her a close view of how people think under pressure, and what fear, grief, and shock can do to ordinary lives. It also gave her the kind of practical knowledge that crime writers often have to build from research alone.

She has said she wrote short stories as a kid and kept writing through school and college, but let fiction slide when work took over. The turn back to novels came when a story idea would not leave her alone. She has also spoken about her long interest in psychology and true crime, which helps explain why her books so often begin with one disturbing question and then keep digging. That first idea became Falling, a debut built around a plane crash, a murder, and four lives pulled together by shock and loss.

From there, Kavanagh kept returning to the question that seems to interest her most: what happens after the worst day of someone's life? Hidden puts a gunman inside a hospital and follows the fear spreading through staff, police, and families. The Missing Hours begins with a mother disappearing from a playground and returning with no memory of where she has been. Even when the setup is sharp and high stakes, the emotional center is usually the aftermath, the panic, the guilt, the blank spaces, and the people trying to function anyway.

That human aftermath is really her lane.

It shows again in The Killer on the Wall, where a woman is forced to revisit the serial murders that marked her teens, and in To Catch a Killer, where DS Alice Parr is drawn into a taunting hunt after trying to save a stabbed woman. The Devil You Know shifts toward identity and family secrets, following Rosa Fisher as an intruder blows apart the story she thought she knew about her own life. Readers who click with Kavanagh's work usually like that mix of pace, pressure, and psychologically believable people. Even when the plots twist hard, her characters still feel bruised, stubborn, frightened, and recognizably human.

She is also very open about how she works. She plans hard, uses spreadsheets, and has joked that her study turned into the nursery, so for a while she wrote in the living room instead. When she is researching, she likes documentaries on in the background. When she is drafting, she wants silence. That mix of method and discipline suits books that often juggle several viewpoints and a lot of tension.

There is a nice fit between the writer and the books. She has spoken about always reading, even during big life moments, and about admiring writers who can plot cleanly without losing sight of character. You can feel that in her own fiction, which moves quickly but rarely treats victims, survivors, or investigators as props. The crimes matter, but the people matter more.

In 2024, Kavanagh wrote frankly about the long stretch after catching Covid in March 2020 and how long Covid disrupted her ability to write. It helps explain the gap between books, but it also sounds very much in keeping with her fiction. She keeps coming back to strain, recovery, and the messy business of carrying on when life has gone badly off course.