Leah Scheier Books in Order

Leah Scheier was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, where books and storytelling were part of the air she breathed early on. As a kid she loved Arthur Conan Doyle, C.S. Lewis, and Lloyd Alexander, and those writers fed her taste for mystery, adventure, and big feelings.

That mix still shows up all through her work.

One small detail says a lot about her as a young reader. She once wrote to Lloyd Alexander, not expecting an answer, and was thrilled when he wrote back just a few days later. Scheier wrote stories when she was young, but in high school she got the familiar message that writing was not the safest way to make a living. She chose medicine instead, studied to become a doctor, and built a career in pediatrics. She has said that science made sense to her, and so did caring for children and families, but the urge to write never really left.

That part just had to wait for a quieter hour.

That hour came after residency, when she was working part time and raising children. In interviews she has said she started writing again at night, after the kids were asleep, and that her first published novel began as Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. Her husband urged her to send the manuscript out, and that nudge led to Secret Letters, her 2012 debut.

Secret Letters introduces Dora, a sharp teenage girl in Victorian England who believes Sherlock Holmes may be her father. The book mixes literary homage with blackmail, missing girls, and a London mystery, and it earned a starred review from School Library Journal. Readers who come to Scheier for plot usually start here, because it shows how much she enjoys a puzzle and a determined young heroine.

Her later novels moved from historical mystery into contemporary YA with heavier emotional stakes. Your Voice Is All I Hear follows April and Jonah through first love and the strain of schizophrenia. Rules of Rain centers on Rain and her autistic twin brother Ethan, turning a family story into a coming-of-age novel about responsibility, identity, and letting go. Music matters in April's story, and cooking shapes Rain's voice, which gives both books a lived-in feel. In both, Scheier writes about teens who want badly to help someone they love, even when love is messy and not enough by itself.

Then came The Last Words We Said, a story of grief, friendship, first love, and faith set among Orthodox Jewish teens. The novel follows Ellie, Rae, and Deenie after Danny disappears, and it became a Sydney Taylor Young Adult Honor Book. It also makes clear one of Scheier's recurring interests, what people do when private belief, family loyalty, and hard facts start pulling in different directions.

Across her books, you can see a few patterns. She likes observant girls, intense relationships, and characters who are carrying more than the adults around them realize. She returns often to mental health, family pressure, Jewish life, and the uneasy line between protecting someone and controlling them. She is also drawn to moments when a teen has to decide whether loyalty means silence, honesty, or stepping back. Even when the setup is dramatic, her stories stay close to ordinary choices and consequences.

Scheier has continued to balance fiction with work as a pediatrician, and that double life feels important to understanding her books. Publisher bios have also described her spending free time playing the violin and volunteering. Over the years she has lived in both the United States and Israel, but the through line is simple: she kept writing, even when medicine was the day job.