Leslie Rule Books in Order

If you want real ghost stories: Coast to Coast Ghosts → Ghosts Among Us → When the Ghost Screams → Ghost in the Mirror
If you want one big paranormal sampler: Haunted in America
If you want eerie suspense novels: Whispers from the Grave → Kill Me Again
If you want true crime: A Tangled Web
If you want miracles instead of hauntings: Where Angels Tread

Leslie Rule was born in Seattle and grew up in the Northwest, in a family where writing was part of daily life. Her mother was Ann Rule, and her father taught high school English, taught creative writing, and published short stories. Leslie has said she knew from the age of seven that she wanted to write books.

Home life gave her two lasting interests. One was storytelling. The other was the strange and unexplained. She grew up in a house overlooking Puget Sound that locals considered haunted, and that early experience never quite left her.

That mix, books on one side, ghosts on the other, shaped almost everything that came next.

When Leslie was seventeen, she began working with her mother as a research assistant and trial photographer. She sat through court proceedings, took notes, and shot many of the courtroom photographs that later appeared in Ann Rule's books. It was practical training, and a close look at how true crime reporting is built, detail by detail.

She did not start with true crime, though. Her first published book was the text for a pictorial on Portland, and she went on to write dozens of magazine pieces for national publications. In the mid-1990s she published the suspense novels Whispers from the Grave and Kill Me Again, both written for younger readers but eerie enough to pull in adults too.

Then came the ghost books that many readers know her for. Coast to Coast Ghosts, Ghosts Among Us, When the Ghost Screams, and Ghost in the Mirror mix firsthand accounts, travel, old newspaper research, and her own photography. What people tend to like in these books is the way she treats the stories as mysteries to be checked, not just campfire tales to be repeated.

She is curious, but she is also a digger.

That same habit of looking closely shows up in Where Angels Tread, which turns from hauntings to stories of miracles and intervention, and later in A Tangled Web, her first full-length true crime book. Published in 2020, A Tangled Web follows the disappearance of Cari Farver and the years of digital impersonation and stalking that hid a murder in plain sight. It brought Leslie back to the world of crime reporting she had known since she was a teenager, but in her own voice.

Across her work, certain themes keep returning: women in danger, secrets that refuse to stay buried, places with long memories, and the uneasy line between what can be explained and what cannot. Even when the subject is paranormal, her books are grounded in people, witnesses, records, and the emotional fallout of violent or unsettling events.

Today Leslie Rule lives in the Seattle area and is also known as a photographer, artist, and longtime animal advocate. After decades of writing suspense, paranormal nonfiction, magazine features, and true crime, she has built a body of work that feels very much her own, practical, spooky, and deeply interested in the stories people carry with them.