Leslie Tentler Books in Order

If you want dark serial-killer suspense: Midnight Caller → Midnight Fear → Edge of Midnight
If you want a small-town coastal trilogy: Before the Storm → Low Tide → In Dark Water
If you want a standalone police case: Fallen
If you want a quick sample of her style: Cold Season

Leslie Tentler grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, and reading seems to have been part of the plan early. She started with Nancy Drew mysteries, then moved on to the historical romances her mother kept around the house. That blend of danger, emotion, and forward momentum still shows up in the books she writes now.

For a long time, fiction was not her full-time lane. Tentler worked in public relations as a writer and editor for nearly two decades before deciding to make a serious run at novel writing. When she did, her first manuscript won multiple Romance Writers of America chapter contest awards, including the Maggie Award of Excellence. It was a strong start, and a practical one, built on years of learning how to shape a story and keep readers moving from one sentence to the next.

That early start set the tone.

Her published debut, Midnight Caller, dropped readers into New Orleans, where radio psychologist Rain Sommers and FBI agent Trevor Rivette are pulled into the orbit of a serial killer known as the Vampire. It is dark, fast, and rooted in place, with the city doing almost as much work as the plot. The book later became a finalist for Best First Novel at ThrillerFest in 2012.

Tentler stayed with that darker kind of suspense in Midnight Fear and Edge of Midnight, the other books in her Chasing Evil trilogy. These novels lean into obsession, old trauma, and investigators who cannot quite leave the job at the office. Readers who like romantic suspense with real jeopardy, not just a light mystery wrapped around a love story, usually connect with these books.

Later, she shifted the backdrop without losing the pressure. Her Rarity Cove novels, Before the Storm, Low Tide, and In Dark Water, move to the South Carolina Lowcountry and a fictional beach town tied together by the St. Clair family, weather, old secrets, and second chances. The mood is a little warmer than the Chasing Evil books, but the threats are still very real, from stalkers and violent exes to murder investigations. Her standalone Fallen, set in Atlanta, follows detective Ryan Winter and ER doctor Lydia Costa as a serial cop killer closes in.

One thing that runs through Tentler's work is her interest in people doing difficult jobs under pressure. Her casts include psychologists, FBI agents, detectives, doctors, reporters, and small-town business owners. Those choices help give the books both emotional stakes and a grounded, everyday texture, even when the danger gets extreme.

Place matters in her books.

Whether she is writing New Orleans streets, Atlanta in the middle of a brutal summer, or the shoreline around Rarity Cove, the setting never feels pasted on. Her characters are often trying to keep working while the past forces its way back in. Tentler is also a two-time finalist for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense, and her books have been translated into multiple languages and released in audio. She lives in the Atlanta area and has continued working as a writer and editor in marketing and public relations alongside her fiction.