Joanna Schaffhausen Books in Order

Joanna Schaffhausen did not come to crime fiction by the usual writing-track route. She studied psychology at Tufts University, earned a doctorate in psychology at Yale, and spent years in neuroscience, drawn to questions about memory, learning, and what happens when the brain goes wrong.

That background led her into science communication before novels took over. She worked as an editorial producer for ABC News on science stories for World News Tonight, Good Morning America, and 20/20. Later she became a scientific editor, spending her days with research on possible treatments for addiction, cancer, and neurological disease.

The brain never really left her fiction.

Schaffhausen has said she wanted to be a writer from the moment she realized books were made by actual people. She wrote her first novel in high school and kept going. For years she sharpened her storytelling in side projects, including a long stretch writing The X-Files fanfiction, where she learned how much readers care about tension, character, and the promise of a good reveal.

Her road to publication was not fast. An early manuscript got her a literary agent, but that did not turn into a career right away, and school, work, marriage, and parenthood took up the space where writing had once lived. She has talked openly about stepping away from fiction for several years while raising a young daughter and working full time, then feeling the words come back all at once.

When they did, an old idea was waiting for her. She had drafted part of a mystery about a female police officer in small-town Massachusetts in a novel class, set it aside, then returned and rewrote it from the ground up. That book became The Vanishing Season, which won the Mystery Writers of America and Minotaur Books First Crime Novel Award in 2016. By her own telling, it took more than twenty earlier manuscripts to get there.

Persistence mattered.

The Ellery Hathaway books, including The Vanishing Season, No Mercy, All the Best Lies, Every Waking Hour, and Last Seen Alive, follow a police officer who survived a serial killer as a teenager and never really got to leave that story behind. Readers often come for the suspense, but stay for the people: Ellery herself, FBI agent Reed Markham, and the way Schaffhausen treats trauma, memory, and identity as the heart of the mystery rather than background decoration.

She later opened a second lane with the Annalisa Vega series, beginning with Gone for Good and continuing through Long Gone, Dead and Gone, All the Way Gone, and Gone in the Night. These books shift to Chicago and lean harder into police work, family loyalties, and the mess that follows when a detective keeps choosing the truth over comfort. In 2026, Gone in the Night won the G. P. Putnam's Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award.

Across both series, Schaffhausen keeps coming back to survivors, victims, buried history, and the uneasy line between justice and obsession. She has said true crime is one of her big idea sources, but her fiction tends to keep the focus on the people harmed and the investigators left to sort through the damage. She lives in the Boston area with her husband, daughter, and a basset hound named Winston, and that mix of science training, newsroom discipline, and long practice at telling mysteries explains a lot about her books.