Eve Chase Books in Order

If you want the gothic doorway in: Black Rabbit Hall.
If sister secrets are your thing: The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde → The Birdcage.
If you like family mysteries with dual timelines: The Glass House.
If you want to read by publication: Black Rabbit Hall → The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde → The Glass House → The Birdcage.

Eve Chase is the pen name of Polly Williams, a British novelist and former journalist who grew up in Oxford. She studied English at Manchester University, then moved into magazine and newspaper work, which gave her a close-up view of deadlines, editors, style pages, and the small dramas of real life.

At 23, she set up and edited her own fashion magazine, Scene. After that she wrote for magazines and newspapers including Punch, You, InStyle, Dazed and Confused, The Sunday Times, and The Independent.

The first plan was not exactly tidy.

When Williams became pregnant, she meant to use early maternity leave to start a novel. Her son arrived earlier than the writing schedule allowed, but the idea stayed with her. That first comic novel, The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy, was published in the UK in 2006 and later in the US as The Yummy Mummy.

She went on to publish several contemporary novels under the name Polly Williams, including A Bad Bride's Tale, A Good Girl Comes Undone, How to Be Married, and Husband, Missing. Those books dealt with family, marriage, motherhood, and the gap between how life looks from the outside and how it feels from the inside.

Then came Eve Chase.

Under that name, she turned toward moodier family mysteries: old houses, missing girls, half-buried histories, and the way a place can hold on to what people would rather forget. Black Rabbit Hall introduced many readers to her favorite territory, a Cornish house full of memory, grief, and unanswered questions.

Her later standalones kept circling the same rich ground while finding new families to unsettle. The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde moves between the 1950s and a modern family trying to begin again at Applecote Manor. The Glass House follows a baby found in the woods near Foxcote Manor and the long shadow that discovery casts. The Birdcage brings three half-sisters back to a Cornish cliff house and to a secret they have spent years avoiding.

Chase's novels tend to be built around families that love each other, fail each other, and keep going anyway. There is usually a crime or disappearance at the center, but the pull comes just as much from sisters, mothers, daughters, houses, woods, weather, and memory.

She lives in Oxford with her family and writes in a small garden studio. It sounds compact, but that seems to suit her. Her books are full of large, echoing places, and sometimes the smallest room is where those places begin.