Megan Collins Books in Order

If you want the best first taste of her work: The Winter Sister → Behind the Red Door
If you like gothic family secrets: The Family Plot → The Winter Sister
If you want domestic suspense and shifting loyalties: Thicker Than Water → Cross My Heart
If you like obsession and messy romance: Cross My Heart → Behind the Red Door

Megan Collins grew up in Bolton, Connecticut, and she has said she wanted to be a writer from the time she was six. One of her first pushes came from her grandparents, who gave her a homemade journal, really just blank pages stapled together, and she filled it with a story called The Bad Cats. That early thrill of making something from nothing seems to have stayed with her.

She was hooked early.

Collins majored in English with a creative writing concentration at Wheaton College, then earned an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. Before her novels found a wide readership, she spent years teaching creative writing, including at Central Connecticut State University and the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. In interviews, she has talked about how much she enjoys helping young writers see what is possible in their own work.

That teacher side of her life never really went away. She now mentors writers through Jericho Writers and serves as editor in chief of 3Elements Review. Long before the thrillers, she was publishing poems and short pieces in literary journals, and that background still shows in the way she builds mood and image.

Her debut novel, The Winter Sister, came out in 2019 and introduced the kind of story she does so well: suspense built from grief, family damage, and old secrets. The book follows Sylvie as she returns home to care for her mother and starts pulling at the threads of her sister Persephone's unsolved murder. Collins has said the novel grew in part from the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and that mythic starting point fits the book's real concerns, mothers, daughters, and the long afterlife of loss.

From there, she kept widening the frame. Behind the Red Door follows a woman who suspects she is tied to a kidnapping she cannot fully remember, while The Family Plot brings readers to an isolated family raised on true crime, then drops a body into the middle of their father's funeral. She has also said part of Behind the Red Door came from wanting to write an anxious character who felt real on the page.

Her books like to put close relationships under strain.

That shows up again in Thicker Than Water, where two sisters-in-law are pushed to opposite sides of a murder case, and in Cross My Heart, a dark novel about a heart transplant recipient who becomes fixated on her donor's husband. Readers who enjoy Collins usually mention the same mix of things: strong atmosphere, New England unease, family tension, and characters whose fears feel painfully believable. Even when the premise gets wild, the emotions stay recognizably human.

By now, a Megan Collins novel usually means old wounds, loyalty tests, and one question that will not leave people alone. Some of her books have also landed with book clubs and monthly store picks, which helped bring her to readers beyond the usual thriller crowd. In 2026 Cross My Heart won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Standalone Novel, a tidy sign of how steadily her audience has grown.

She still lives in Connecticut. She has mentioned a fondness for dogs, miniatures, and cake, which feels like a nice counterweight to all the darkness on the page.