Jane Corry Books in Order

If you want the breakthrough novel: My Husband's Wife → Blood Sisters → The Dead Ex
If you like family secrets and moral pressure: To Tell The Truth → We All Have Our Secrets
If you prefer ordinary lives tipping into disaster: I Looked Away → I Made a Mistake → Coming To Find You
If you want her newer dual-timeline suspense: I Died on a Tuesday → The Stranger in Room Six

Jane Corry came to crime fiction after years of writing about real life. Before her thrillers started landing on bestseller lists, she worked as a journalist, wrote columns and features, and spent a long time studying how people behave when love, pressure, guilt and fear all get tangled together. That mix sits right at the center of her fiction.

She spent much of her childhood in the suburbs of Harrow, where she lived with her grandmother until she was twelve. Books were part of everyday life, and she was writing little stories from an early age. Corry has said she wanted to be an author for as long as she can remember, and that close family life, especially her bond with her grandmother Doris, stayed with her.

She studied English at Reading and then joined the Thomson graduate training scheme in journalism. Early jobs took her from a fashion trade magazine to women’s magazines and national newspapers. She interviewed public figures, wrote about family life, and learned how to notice the tiny details people reveal without meaning to.

Journalism gave her a living, but fiction kept calling.

Life got busy, as it does. She married young, raised three children, and wrote around family life, often from home. She has spoken about how personal upheaval, including the end of her first marriage, forced her to think hard about work, money, and what came next. That difficult stretch led her to one of the most important jobs of her life, one she never expected to take.

It was a post as writer in residence at a high-security men’s prison.

From 2007 to 2010, Corry worked at HMP Grendon, helping inmates write letters, poems, life stories, and more. She has said the experience was sometimes frightening, often surprising, and impossible to forget. Around the same period she also taught creative writing at Oxford University, which makes for quite a contrast, prison workshops one day, university teaching the next. Before her darker novels arrived, she had already published warm-hearted fiction under the names Sophie King and Janey Fraser, so the move into suspense was a real turn.

That prison experience fed directly into My Husband's Wife, the book that introduced many readers to her thrillers. Since then she has written novels such as Blood Sisters, The Dead Ex, I Looked Away, We All Have Our Secrets, I Died on a Tuesday, and The Stranger in Room Six. What readers often like is that the setup feels close to ordinary life at first, a marriage under strain, a family secret, a terrible accident, a town that thinks it knows the truth, and then the pressure slowly builds. Her stories are full of flawed people making bad choices for reasons that still feel human.

She is especially drawn to what crime does to families and communities, not just to victims and villains. Guilt, divided loyalties, hidden histories, memory, and the long aftershock of violence show up again and again in her books. Even when the plots twist hard, the emotional core stays clear.

These days Corry lives in Devon with her second husband and stays close to the sea she loves. She has written about swimming outdoors, walking the dog, and looking after her grandchildren, and those small, lived-in details help explain why her fiction feels grounded even when the danger ramps up. She still teaches and speaks about writing from time to time, and her career is a good reminder that the long route can give a writer a lot to work with.