Fiona Davis Books in Order

If you’re new to Fiona Davis: The Lions of Fifth Avenue → The Magnolia Palace → The Spectacular
If you love dual-timeline mysteries: The Dollhouse → The Address → The Masterpiece
If you’re drawn to theater and politics: The Chelsea Girls
If you want her most recent landmark novel: The Stolen Queen
If you prefer shorter historical reads: The Gimlet Slip → A Wild Rose → Stories from Suffragette City

Fiona Davis was born in Canada in 1966 and spent her childhood moving between New Jersey, Utah, and Texas. That constant change gave her an early feel for how places shape people, a thread that runs through all of her fiction. Today she’s best known for historical novels that turn New York City landmarks into fully realized characters.

After studying at the College of William & Mary, she headed to New York City with her sights set on the stage. She trained, auditioned, and built a career as an actress, working on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in regional theater. For about a decade, scripts, rehearsals, and crowded backstage corridors were her everyday world.

Over time, the pull of storytelling shifted from performing other people’s words to crafting her own. Davis enrolled in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree and trading rehearsal rooms for newsrooms. She went on to work as a journalist and freelance editor, writing about theater, health, fitness, and the arts.

Those years gave her a reporter’s eye for detail and structure, which she eventually poured into fiction. Her debut novel, The Dollhouse, published in 2016, explores the Barbizon Hotel for Women through a dual timeline that links a 1950s secretary-in-training with a modern journalist digging into the building’s past. It set the template for the books that followed: strong women, layered secrets, and the tension between public glamour and private risk.

The Address shifts the focus to the Dakota apartment building, braiding together a 19th‑century housekeeper and a 1980s designer whose lives collide around a long-buried crime. In The Masterpiece, Davis turns to Grand Central Terminal, pairing a 1920s art instructor with a 1970s single mother caught in the fight to save the station. The Chelsea Girls moves into the famed Chelsea Hotel, tracing a friendship between a playwright and an actress tested by the fear and fallout of the McCarthy era.

With The Lions of Fifth Avenue, she steps inside the New York Public Library, following a superintendent’s family in 1913 and a rare-books curator in 1993 as both confront a trail of missing volumes and family secrets. The Magnolia Palace centers on the Frick mansion and museum, connecting a 1919 artists’ model who becomes enmeshed with the Frick family to a 1960s fashion model stranded inside the museum during a blizzard. In The Spectacular, Davis turns the spotlight on Radio City Music Hall and the Rockettes in the 1950s, blending the glitter of precision dance with the very real anxiety of a long-unidentified bomber stalking New York.

Her later work widens the map while keeping a New York anchor. The Stolen Queen moves between an archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in the 1930s and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1970s, following two women drawn into the mystery of a missing artifact and a maligned female pharaoh. She has also written shorter historical pieces, including the Prohibition‑era novella The Gimlet Slip and the Carnegie Hall–set story A Wild Rose, and co-edited the suffrage-themed anthology Stories from Suffragette City.

Across all of these projects, Davis returns to certain ideas: women negotiating ambition and duty, the quiet power of work, and how buildings hold on to the lives lived inside them. Her novels have reached a wide audience, landing on bestseller lists, earning a Good Morning America book club pick, and being translated into many languages. She lives in New York City, where she still spends time in the museums, libraries, and streets that fuel her stories.