Heidi Perks Books in Order

If you want the breakout missing-child thriller: Her One Mistake / Now You See Her
If you like buried secrets in small communities: Come Back For Me → The Whispers
If office politics sounds especially dangerous: Three Perfect Liars
If you prefer relationship drama with twists: The Other Guest → For the Last Time / The Last Resort → Someone is Lying
If you want her most contained, ticking-clock setup: It Ends Here

Heidi Perks was born and raised in Bournemouth, the seaside town on England's south coast that still shapes so much of her fiction. She spent a short spell in London, then moved back, and she now lives in Bournemouth with her husband and two children. The sea, the small-town feel, and the idea that lovely places can hide ugly secrets are all over her books.

Writing started early. As a child she made up stories, poems, and even homemade magazines that she sold to family members for 20p. She has talked about loving Enid Blyton and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, and about getting through school while gazing out of the window and inventing worlds in her head.

For a long time, though, writing sat beside a more conventional career. Perks studied Retail Management at Bournemouth University and then spent about fifteen years working in marketing. That experience gave her a close look at offices, ambition, shifting loyalties, and the polished version of life people show at work, all details she would later use in her thrillers.

Then 2012 changed the plan.

Just after the birth of her second child, she took redundancy from her marketing job and decided to see if she could finally write a novel. She set herself word-count deadlines, finished a manuscript within a year, and was accepted onto the inaugural Curtis Brown Creative online novel writing course. Publication did not arrive quickly. There were rejections, two agents along the way, and a lot of waiting before Beneath The Surface appeared in 2016.

The book that really widened her audience was Now You See Her, published in the United States as Her One Mistake. Built around a missing child and the fallout between two mothers, it became a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, a Sunday Times bestseller, and later earned a Nielsen Silver Bestseller Award after selling more than 250,000 copies. It also set the pattern for what many readers now come to her for, domestic life pushed into panic.

She kept going from there. Come Back For Me takes a body found at a childhood home and turns it into a tense island mystery. Three Perfect Liars brings office politics, motherhood, and rivalry together around a deadly fire. The Whispers starts with a missing friend and uses school-gate gossip, old resentments, and rising suspicion to show how fast trust can fall apart.

That mix is her lane.

Perks has said she is fascinated by what makes people tick, especially inside families and friendships where love and resentment sit side by side. Her books are usually thrillers without much gore. The tension comes from secrets, divided loyalties, bad choices, and that slow, awful moment when you realize the person in front of you may not be telling the truth. She also has a soft spot for slightly dysfunctional characters, which gives even the most tense plots a human center.

She writes full time now, something she once had to squeeze around work and family life, often at the kitchen table. Much of her inspiration still comes from home, and she has mentioned using places along the south coast as starting points for her stories. That feels right. Heidi Perks writes suspense that often begins with ordinary things, a school run, a holiday, a marriage, a group of friends, and then asks what might be waiting just beneath the surface.