Mary Torjussen Books in Order

If you want the clearest starting point: Gone Without a Trace → The Girl I Used to Be → The Closer You Get
If you like missing-person suspense: Gone Without a Trace
If you prefer blackmail and buried secrets: The Girl I Used to Be
If you want messy relationships and mounting menace: The Closer You Get

Mary Torjussen grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, in a house with no television, so books became her entertainment early on. She has said she spent hours reading and writing stories as a child, which feels like a fitting start for someone who would later build whole novels out of secrets, fear, and the things people don't say.

Adult life took a few turns before writing became her full-time job. After working in London for several years, she moved to Merseyside and later earned an MA in Creative Writing from Liverpool John Moores University. She also spent many years teaching in Liverpool, including decades teaching Information Technology to teenagers, and by her own account she loved the job, even while writing in the evenings.

The shift from teacher to novelist was gradual, and hard won. Torjussen has talked openly about divorce, raising two children on her own, and trying to make space for fiction around the rest of life. When her children were older, she returned seriously to writing, and the workshops on her MA course helped her learn the skill she values most, how to critique her own work.

That patience shows.

Before her wider breakthrough, she wrote and self-published two earlier novels after some near misses with agents and editors. Later, when her employer offered voluntary redundancy, she took the chance and gave herself a year to write a book that could find a traditional publisher. That book was Gone Without a Trace, and it changed things.

She has said the idea for Gone Without a Trace came from an online forum post about a woman who came home to find her boyfriend had moved out while she was at work. Torjussen started wondering about the person who vanished, and that small real-life prompt became a thriller about obsession, humiliation, and the panic of feeling your reality slip. Liverpool and the Wirral shape the book's mood, which helps give it a grounded, lived-in feel.

She knows how to make ordinary lives feel unsafe.

That same pressure runs through The Girl I Used to Be and The Closer You Get. Her stories usually begin with women who seem to have recognisable lives, jobs, partners, homes, routines, then one bad night, one missing person, one lie, or one terrible decision sends everything off course. In one book the trouble comes as blackmail and missing memories, in another it grows from an affair gone badly wrong. Readers who like domestic suspense tend to respond to the way she mixes relationship drama with creeping menace, control, jealousy, and the slow return of buried secrets.

She has also spoken about loving writers such as Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, and Mary Stewart, and that makes sense when you read her work. Her novels like misdirection, red herrings, uneasy atmosphere, and the moment when a small detail suddenly looks dangerous. She has said that when she plans a thriller, she thinks hard about a character's biggest fear, then keeps pushing them toward it.

She lives on the Wirral, across the River Mersey from Liverpool, and has two adult children. Her novels are not about glamorous detectives or giant conspiracies. They are about private lives under pressure, the strange things people hide from each other, and how quickly home can stop feeling safe. That mix of the familiar and the frightening is where her books do their best work.