Laura Marshall Books in Order

Laura Marshall grew up in Wiltshire, studied English at the University of Sussex, and now lives in Kent with her family. Her route to publication wasn't a straight line, which is part of what makes her story feel familiar to anyone who's put a creative plan on hold while life got busy.

Before her novels found readers, Marshall worked as a conference producer. Her job involved researching subjects, shaping programmes, finding speakers, and writing promotional copy. It was practical work that needed curiosity, organisation, and the ability to make a subject clear, skills that also serve a suspense writer well.

She'd wanted to write fiction for years. In 2004, she began a crime novel and returned to it from time to time, but never completed it. Work and family came first, and she later recognised that she still needed to learn more about structure and plotting.

In 2015, she decided to give the goal proper time and attention. She applied for a three-month creative-writing course at Curtis Brown Creative, submitting an excerpt and synopsis even though she had not yet started the novel in earnest.

The deadline got her moving.

Marshall began the course with the central idea for Friend Request: a woman receives an online message from a girl she bullied at school, a girl believed to have died 25 years earlier. With feedback from her tutor and fellow students, she completed a draft, found an agent, and turned that unsettling premise into her first published novel. The manuscript was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and was runner-up in the Bath Novel Award in 2016.

Friend Request introduced the kind of tension that runs through Marshall's books. Ordinary lives are shaken by old guilt, half-hidden histories, and the fear that someone else knows the worst thing a character has done. In the novel, Louise Williams must confront memories of school bullying after Maria Weston, a former classmate thought dead, appears to contact her online. It combines a modern social-media worry with the messy dynamics of teenage friendship.

Her later novels keep changing the setting and setup while returning to questions of trust, family, friendship, and the stories people tell to protect themselves. Three Little Lies follows Ellen after her friend Sasha disappears, pulling her back toward a damaging event from their teenage years. In The Anniversary, Cassie Colman re-examines a mass shooting that killed her father when she was four. My Husband's Killer moves the pressure to an Amalfi Coast holiday and a widow's discovery that her dead husband had secrets.

Marshall's fifth novel, A Good Place to Hide a Body, gives the familiar family-help scenario a grim turn when Penny's elderly parents call to say there is a body in their garden. Her sixth, Kiss Marry Kill, published in November 2025, centres on three friends whose lives collide after an abusive partner has a fatal accident. The books are dark, but they stay close to recognisable people dealing with relationships, responsibility, and bad choices.

She still works with writers as an editor and mentor for creative-writing schools, as well as offering manuscript feedback. It's a fitting second strand to her career. She knows how much a useful deadline, honest notes, and a little outside help can change a half-formed idea.