Jess Ryder Books in Order

If you're new to Jess Ryder: Lie to Me → The Good Sister → The Ex-Wife
If you like domestic marriage suspense: The Ex-Wife → The Second Marriage → My Husband's Lover
If you want eerie houses and buried secrets: The Dream House → The Villa
If family drama is your thing: The Girl You Gave Away → The Night Away → One of the Family

Jess Ryder is the thriller name used by Jan Page, a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and television producer. She was born in London and grew up in Essex, in a home where books and spoken stories mattered. Her mother read to her often and recited poetry, which gave her an early feel for rhythm, character, and the pleasure of being carried along by a story.

That love of stories turned practical at the University of Manchester, where she studied English and Drama. Writing for the stage was the big spark. Plays led to more plays, and over time more than a dozen were professionally staged. It makes sense when you read her thrillers. They move with the clean pace of someone who knows exactly when to reveal a line, a look, or a problem.

Before she became known for psychological suspense, Page spent many years in television, especially children’s television. She wrote for shows including Thomas the Tank Engine, Postman Pat, and The Tweenies, and she co-founded Adastra, an independent production company in the children’s sector. She also co-created Grandpa in My Pocket. That background matters. Television teaches economy. It teaches scene-building. And it teaches how much tension you can squeeze out of what a character says, and what they refuse to say.

Then she came back to novels, this time with a darker edge.

Her first Jess Ryder thriller, Lie to Me, arrived in 2017 and quickly set the pattern for what readers now expect: family secrets, unstable memories, and ordinary lives tipping into danger. It was followed by The Good Sister, with its unsettling half-sister reveal, and then The Ex-Wife, a domestic thriller about jealousy, trust, and the man at the center of two women’s lives. The Ex-Wife became a digital and audio bestseller, reached the top five of the UK charts, and later made the jump to television.

Other books widen the same territory in smart ways. The Dream House uses a crumbling seaside property to stir up fear, buried history, and questions of trust. The Girl You Gave Away starts with a birthday card that brings an old secret crashing back into the present. The Night Away takes a new mother’s worst fear and pushes it to breaking point. Across the books, Ryder keeps coming back to the same pressures: what people hide inside families, how the past refuses to stay put, and how quickly safety can become something else. Readers who like shifting loyalties and point of view surprises usually feel at home here.

She has never written for just one age group, either. Under the name Jan Page, she has published books for children and young adults, including Drummer, the Corgi Pups books, Juggling Lessons, and Selina Penaluna. That range helps explain why her suspense fiction is so readable. The prose is direct, the setups are clear, and the emotional stakes land fast.

She likes stories that move, and hers do.

These days she lives in London and has four grown-up children. She has also spoken about loving Cornwall, especially Trevone Bay, and it is easy to see why coastlines and uneasy houses keep showing up in her fiction. Put it all together and the Jess Ryder books feel carefully built but never stiff, domestic thrillers with a dramatist’s timing, a screenwriter’s sense of momentum, and a sharp eye for what people do under pressure.