Laura Wilson Books in Order

Laura Wilson was born and brought up in London, and the city runs right through her fiction. Her novels keep returning to its streets, flats, pubs, hospitals, and hidden corners, whether she is writing about the Blitz, the 1950s, or a more contemporary family crisis.

She has a sharp feel for how ordinary lives slide into danger.

Wilson studied English literature at Somerville College, Oxford, and at University College London. Before her crime novels found a wide readership, she worked briefly as a teacher and later as an editor of non-fiction. She also wrote history books for children. That mix of literary study, editorial discipline, and curiosity about the recent past shows up again and again in her work.

Her debut novel, A Little Death, set the pattern for a lot of what followed: a layered mystery, a long shadow from the past, and characters who are secretive, damaged, or trapped by the lives they have built. The book was shortlisted for the Ellis Peters Award. Early novels such as Dying Voices, Telling Lies to Alice, and A Thousand Lies carried on in that same uneasy, intimate register.

Buried history is one of her favourite tools.

Then came The Lover, one of her best-known novels, set in London during the Blitz and built around the real case of the Blackout Ripper. It won the Prix du Polar Europeen in France and was shortlisted for both the Gold Dagger and the Ellis Peters Award. Readers who come to Wilson through this book often stay for the same reason: she can make a dark story tense and unsettling without losing sight of fear, class, money, sex, and the daily compromises people make to get through bad times.

She followed it with the DI Ted Stratton series, beginning with Stratton's War, which won the Ellis Peters Award. These novels move through wartime and postwar London, from bombsites and hospitals to Soho rooms and Notting Hill streets. An Empty Death, A Capital Crime, A Willing Victim, and The Riot show what Wilson does especially well. She uses murder investigations to get at larger questions about power, prejudice, corruption, and the damage left behind after public upheaval. Ted Stratton is a good guide for that world because he is persistent, humane, and rarely impressed by status.

Her standalones keep changing shape, but they tend to circle similar pressures. Families keep secrets. The past refuses to stay buried. Women often find themselves boxed in by old loyalties, bad men, money, or reputation, and then have to think fast. Later books such as The Wrong Girl and The Other Woman lean more openly into psychological suspense, but they still carry the same interest in guilt, memory, and the stories people tell themselves to cope.

Wilson has also been a visible part of the wider crime-writing world. She has reviewed crime and thriller fiction for the Guardian since 2007, programmed the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival in 2009, co-programmed the Killer Women Crime Fiction Festival from 2016 to 2019, and taught on the Crime Thriller Novel MA course at City University in London from 2013 to 2018. She also writes young adult fiction as Jamie Costello.

She lives in London, which feels fitting, because the city's recent past sits at the heart of so much of her work.