JS Monroe Books in Order

If you want the breakthrough psychological thriller: Find Me
If you like identity puzzles and uneasy village secrets: Forget My Name → The Other You → The Man on Hackpen Hill
If you want the full Daniel Marchant spy arc: Dead Spy Running → Games Traitors Play → Dirty Little Secret
If you want Jon Stock's earlier standalones: The Cardamom Club → The Riot Act
If you want a shorter spy read first: To Snare a Spy

J.S. Monroe is the pen name of British novelist and journalist Jon Stock, who was born in England in 1966. He studied at Sherborne School in Dorset, read English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and spent years in journalism before fiction became his full-time job.

Then came journalism.

Stock worked as a freelance journalist in London, moved to New Delhi as a foreign correspondent, and later returned to the UK to edit the Weekend section of the Daily Telegraph. That background shows in the fiction. His books are full of pressure, hidden motives, and official stories that do not quite add up.

His first novel, The Riot Act, appeared in 1997 and was shortlisted for a major debut crime award. A few years later came The Cardamom Club, then the Daniel Marchant books, beginning with Dead Spy Running. Those novels gave him London, Poland, India, Morocco, and the moral mess of intelligence work.

That mix of public danger and private doubt became one of his trademarks.

Around 2015 he became a full-time author, and not long after that he shifted into psychological thrillers under the J.S. Monroe name. Find Me was the first of them, and it found readers far beyond Britain. Its premise is simple and unsettling, a man convinced his dead girlfriend may still be alive.

The Monroe books keep worrying at memory, identity, and the limits of what the mind can prove. Forget My Name, published in the United States as The Last Thing She Remembers, starts with a woman who cannot remember her own name but is sure she belongs in a stranger's house. The Other You takes on face recognition and the fear that the person beside you is no longer who they seem. In The Man on Hackpen Hill, an anonymous tip and a staged body pull the story into Wiltshire.

He likes a clever premise, but he likes what that premise does to people even more.

Readers often come for the thriller machinery, spies, impostors, conspiracies, missing memory, but stay for the way ordinary lives get bent out of shape by those pressures. His protagonists are rarely cool masters of the situation. They are wounded, doubtful, stubborn, and usually short on time.

Place matters to him too. He lives in Wiltshire with his wife, the photographer Hilary Stock, and they have three adult children. In the Monroe novels, that part of England is never just postcard pretty. Villages, ancient earthworks, and research sites carry their own hum of secrecy. He has also worked with the Royal Literary Fund.

More recently, he moved beyond fiction with The Sleep Room, a nonfiction book about the psychiatrist William Sargant and a troubling chapter in British medical history. Whether Stock is writing about spies, memory, or medicine, he keeps circling the places where authority looks solid from a distance and much less solid up close.