Hester Fox Books in Order

If you want the classic starting point: The Witch of Willow Hall → The Widow of Pale Harbor → The Orphan of Cemetery Hill
If you like haunted houses and buried family history: A Lullaby for Witches → The Last Heir to Blackwood Library
If you want her more fantasy-leaning books: The Book of Thorns → A Magic Deep and Drowning
If you want a quick dose of old-school chills: Haunted House Stories

Hester Fox writes historical novels full of old houses, uneasy inheritances, and the feeling that the past is never really finished. She is a full-time writer and mother, and her work keeps returning to the New England landscapes and histories that clearly shaped her imagination.

She has said she wanted to be an author when she was little, though that dream had plenty of company. Archaeology, history, art, and storytelling all pulled at her early, and growing up in New England meant living alongside Salem history, regional folklore, and the kind of old buildings that seem to keep their own memories tucked into the walls.

Before fiction became her full-time work, Fox spent years working directly with the material past.

Her background is in museum work and historical archaeology, and she has a master's degree in historical archaeology along with study in medieval studies and art history. As a collections maintenance technician, she cared for everything from paintings by old masters to ancient artifacts to early American furniture. That is good training for a novelist who pays close attention to rooms, objects, and the quiet clues people leave behind.

Fox has talked about how artifacts can tell stories that the written record leaves out, especially when it comes to women's lives. That idea runs straight through her fiction. Her novels often center women who have been ignored, silenced, or misunderstood, then place them in houses, villages, and landscapes where history keeps pushing back.

Her debut novel, The Witch of Willow Hall, was published in 2018. Fox has said she began that book on a plane to Iceland, which feels fitting for a story so wrapped up in atmosphere and place. Set in 1821, it follows the Montrose sisters after scandal drives their family from Boston to a country estate with a dark history, and it established many of the things readers now expect from her: gothic mood, romance, family secrets, and a supernatural thread tied closely to feeling.

She followed it with more eerie historical novels rooted in strong settings and intimate stakes. The Widow of Pale Harbor moves to coastal Maine, where grief, suspicion, and crimes echoing Edgar Allan Poe shape the story. The Orphan of Cemetery Hill heads to 1844 Boston and follows a young woman who can speak with the recently dead. A Lullaby for Witches feels especially close to Fox's own interests, pairing a modern museum worker with the buried story of a nineteenth-century woman nearly erased from her family's history.

She did not stay in one lane for long.

Later books widened her map without losing her love of atmosphere and buried secrets. The Last Heir to Blackwood Library heads to postwar Yorkshire and builds a mystery around inheritance, memory, and a strange library. The Book of Thorns stretches across the Napoleonic Wars and follows sisters divided by history and joined by a magical language of flowers. Then A Magic Deep and Drowning reimagines The Little Mermaid in the Dutch Republic, showing how comfortably Fox can move from New England gothic to broader historical fantasy. Today she lives in a small mill town in Massachusetts, and that feels like a neat match for her fiction: grounded in history, interested in the overlooked, and always ready to let something uncanny slip in through the door.