Kim Taylor Blakemore Books in Order

If you want gothic suspense: The Companion → After Alice Fell → The Deception
If you want the biggest mystery first: After Alice Fell → The Deception
If you prefer YA historical fiction: Bowery Girl → Cissy Funk
If you want to sample her range: Cissy Funk → Bowery Girl → The Companion

Kim Taylor Blakemore grew up in the American West and, by her own account, never really left it behind. Big skies, red rock, prairies, river gorges, and the Pacific coast still shape the way she talks about place, and that helps explain why setting matters so much in her fiction. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family and a crowd of rescue cats and dogs.

She writes historical novels, but not the polished, stately version of history. Her books tend to follow women on the edges: thieves, companions, girls on hard farms, mediums, servants, and people with more nerve than power. She has said she is most interested in the people who are not queens or princesses, the ones who get through life with wit, stubbornness, and very few good options.

Before the gothic suspense, there were young adult novels. The first novel she wrote was Cissy Funk, a Depression-era story set on the Colorado plains, and it went on to win the WILLA Literary Award. Then came Bowery Girl, a gritty novel set in 1883 New York that landed on the New York Public Library Best Reads for Teens list.

Then the work got darker.

Blakemore has described story ideas arriving first as images, almost like scenes from a film. Her background in theatre and acting shaped that approach, and so did years spent working as a developmental editor and founding the Novelitics Writers Collective. When The Companion began to take shape, the spark was a stark image of a woman in a cell beneath a high window, telling her story in circles. She carried that voice around for years. Then, at a writing workshop on the Oregon coast in 2018, Lucy Blunt finally showed up in full and the book was ready to be written.

That patience paid off. The Companion became her adult debut and won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award. It was followed by After Alice Fell, a mystery about a woman investigating her sister's death at an asylum in 1865 New Hampshire, and then The Deception, which moves into the world of spiritualism, fraud, and danger in 1877. Readers who click with Blakemore usually come for the tension, but they stay for the women at the center of it, watchful, complicated, and rarely as safe as they first appear.

She also brings other parts of her life into the work in quiet ways. In interviews, she has talked about teaching orientation and mobility for blind and low-vision adults, and that background informed The Companion without turning blindness into a gimmick. That choice fits her fiction as a whole. Even when the plots are twisty, she stays interested in how people move through the world, who gets overlooked, and what survival can cost.

These are not costume dramas.

What ties her books together is a steady interest in hidden motives, skewed power, family damage, and women making impossible choices inside systems that were never built for them. Even when she shifts from the Colorado plains to the Bowery to nineteenth-century New Hampshire, the thread is easy to spot. She likes pressure, secrets, and characters who keep going.

These days, in addition to writing, she has been pursuing a Master of Divinity. It is an interesting counterpoint to novels full of grifters, ghosts, and moral fog. She still lives in the rainy Northwest, still loves history, and still seems happiest telling stories about dangerous women. She has also admitted to fearing scary movies, which feels only fair after writing a few scenes that might make other people sleep with a light on.