Lori Rader Day Books in Order

Lori Rader-Day was born in Boone County, Indiana, and grew up in the kind of landscape that keeps showing up in her books, back roads, small towns, and fields that seem peaceful until they don't. She attended Western Boone Jr.-Sr. High School and later Ball State University in Muncie, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism.

Writing was a long goal, but she did not jump straight from school to publishing novels. She worked in advertising and marketing communications, mostly in higher education and nonprofit health care, and later earned an MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University in Chicago. That mix of reporting, day-job realism, and craft study helped shape the way she tells stories.

Rader-Day writes mysteries and suspense novels that care as much about emotional fallout as plot. Her books are usually built around women who are grieving, cornered, underestimated, or all three. She likes pressure-cooker situations, but she is just as interested in what shame, loyalty, and fear do to everyday life.

The Midwest never really leaves her fiction.

Her debut, The Black Hour, arrived in 2014. It follows sociology professor Amelia Emmet after a campus shooting leaves her injured and obsessed with the question of why she was targeted. The novel won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. A year later came Little Pretty Things, a motel-set mystery about Juliet Townsend, an old rival, and a murder that makes her the chief suspect. That book won the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

She kept pushing into new kinds of suspense. The Day I Died centers on handwriting expert Anna Winger and a missing-boy case that drags her past back into view. Under a Dark Sky places a grieving widow at a remote dark sky park where a murder turns strangers and old friends alike into suspects. In The Lucky One, a woman who survived a childhood kidnapping sees a face from her past on a missing-persons site and starts pulling at a thread that refuses to stay buried. These are standalone novels, but readers often come back for the same things: complicated women, strong atmosphere, and communities full of buried history.

Then she proved she could do historical mystery too.

Death at Greenway takes readers to Agatha Christie's Greenway House during the Second World War, where nurse trainee Bridey Kelly cares for evacuated children and finds herself in the middle of a killing. The novel won the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel. The Death of Us returns to small-town secrets and family strain, while Wreck Your Heart heads into Chicago's country music scene with singer Dahlia "Doll" Devine, mixing ambition, family trouble, and murder. She has also published short fiction, including work in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Outside the novels, Rader-Day has been deeply involved in the mystery community. She served as national president of Sisters in Crime from 2019 to 2020, has held leadership roles with Mystery Writers of America, and helps lead the Midwest Mystery Conference. She teaches creative writing through Northwestern University's School of Professional Studies and lives in Chicago with her husband Greg and their dog Clementine. It feels fitting: her books are rooted in everyday places, but she knows exactly how to make them uneasy.