Jo Jakeman Books in Order

Jo Jakeman was born in Cyprus and worked for many years in London before moving to the countryside with her husband and twin sons. She later settled in Cornwall, where coastal walks, reading, and writing are part of everyday life. Her novels often start with a familiar domestic situation, then pull at the secrets hiding underneath it.

Her route to publication was not a straight line. Jakeman worked in recruitment, while reading and writing remained something she did around work and family life. A diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome changed the pace of things. She expected to rest and return to her old job, but recovery did not follow that tidy plan.

Writing gradually became a more serious part of her days. When her children started school, she decided to see whether she could produce work for readers beyond her own family. She volunteered at a local book festival, read writing guides, joined an online Curtis Brown Creative course, and started entering competitions.

In 2016, she was shortlisted for both Best Opening Chapter and Friday Night Live at the York Festival of Writing. Even after emergency surgery shortly before the festival, she made the trip and read from the manuscript that would become Sticks and Stones. She won Friday Night Live that evening and met the agent who would go on to represent her.

That night turned a private habit into a working life.

Sticks and Stones, published in North America as The Exes' Revenge, introduced the kind of tense, darkly funny domestic thriller Jakeman enjoys writing. It follows three women whose lives have been damaged by the same controlling man. The book asks what happens when people who have been pushed aside decide they have had enough, while keeping the danger close and personal.

Her next novel, Safe House, shifts to the Cornish coast. A woman trying to escape the consequences of a devastating mistake takes a new name and moves into a remote village, only to find that a fresh start is harder to protect than she hoped. It combines an uneasy small-community setting with the fear of being recognized and the pressure of a past that will not stay buried.

In What His Wife Knew, Jakeman takes on a more traditional mystery shape. Beth Lomas refuses to accept that her husband's death was suicide and starts asking questions about the life they shared. As family history, friendships, and old resentments come into view, the story becomes a search for truth as well as a test of how well anyone can know the person beside them.

Across these books, Jakeman returns to trust, control, revenge, and the gap between appearances and reality. Her characters are often ordinary people forced to make difficult choices when the rules of their home lives suddenly change.

She now writes from Cornwall, with its coastal paths and changeable weather close at hand. It is a fitting place for thrillers that are interested in what people carry with them, even when they think they have escaped.