Hank Phillippi Ryan Books in Order

If you want the reporter mysteries from the beginning: Prime Time → Face Time → Air Time → Drive Time
If you want a Boston crime series with a detective angle: The Other Woman → The Wrong Girl → Truth Be Told → What You See
If you want a twisty standalone first: Trust Me → The Murder List → The First to Lie
If you want her newer domestic suspense: Her Perfect Life → The House Guest → One Wrong Word → All This Could Be Yours

Hank Phillippi Ryan was born in Chicago and grew up in the Indianapolis area, long before Boston readers came to know her as the reporter simply called Hank. She went to Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, studied at the International School in Hamburg, and has said she majored in Shakespeare while making plenty of time for reading on her own and listening to rock records. Even early on, books, news, and performance were all in the mix.

Her first publishing job was gloriously unglamorous.

As a teenager, she spent a summer proofreading the Indiana Code of Laws out loud. Later she worked a long list of sharp-edged jobs that now sound like training for her fiction: radio reporter, political campaign worker, Senate legislative aide, and editorial assistant in Rolling Stone's Washington bureau, where she helped with political coverage. She came up through places where facts mattered, deadlines were real, and somebody was always hiding something.

Television gave her the public version of her career. She started in TV news in 1975, first in Indianapolis and then in Atlanta, before moving to Boston. At WHDH-TV, she built a reputation as an investigative reporter whose stories did not just expose problems, they often forced action. Over the years, her reporting has helped win refunds and restitution for consumers, keep families from losing homes, send wrongdoers to prison, and push officials to change laws and practices.

She did not begin as a novelist.

Fiction came later, as a second-act career, but it never felt disconnected from the day job. Ryan has said her novels grow out of a lifetime spent investigating true crime and watching how people behave when money, fear, ambition, and secrets collide. That background is all over her books. The plots move fast, the details feel lived in, and the women at the center usually have to think on their feet because nobody is coming to save them.

Her first novel, Prime Time, arrived in 2007 and introduced Charlotte McNally, a Boston television reporter trying to keep her footing in a business obsessed with ratings, looks, and the next big story. Readers who like newsroom energy, wit, and a capable heroine under pressure often start there. The Charlotte books, including Face Time, Air Time, and Drive Time, mix crime plotting with the daily grind of broadcasting, which Ryan knows from the inside.

Then she widened the frame. Starting with The Other Woman, Ryan launched the Jane Ryland books, pairing a determined reporter with homicide detective Jake Brogan and letting Boston politics, policing, and city scandals crash into each other. In The Wrong Girl, Truth Be Told, and What You See, she keeps returning to the same human fault lines, family secrets, institutional failure, and the way one lie can spread through an entire city.

Her standalones push even harder into manipulation and identity. Trust Me, The Murder List, The First to Lie, Her Perfect Life, The House Guest, and One Wrong Word all ask who controls the story when reputation is on the line. Later books like All This Could Be Yours keep that same pressure-cooker feeling, fame and family on one side, danger on the other. Readers tend to come for the twists, but they stay because Ryan never forgets the people trapped inside them.

The awards are real, but the route there is what makes her interesting.

On the fiction side, she has won many of the major mystery awards. On the journalism side, she has collected 37 Emmy Awards and 14 Edward R. Murrow Awards. She has also stayed active in the mystery world as a teacher, moderator, and past president of Sisters in Crime, which fits her whole career: she is not just writing books, she is part of the community that keeps the genre moving.

Ryan lives in the Boston area with her husband, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney. It is hard to imagine a better setup for a suspense writer, one person spending the day chasing facts, the other arguing about what they mean. Her books carry both instincts, urgency and doubt, which is a big reason they feel so brisk, so sharp, and so grounded.