Melissa Ferguson Books in Order

Melissa Ferguson writes romantic comedies that put ordinary people in situations that are just ridiculous enough to feel possible. Her stories make room for messy families, stubborn neighbors, workplace trouble, and people who are trying to figure out what they want from life. There is usually a romance in the middle of it all, but the side characters and the chaos get plenty of page time too.

Writing was not always the plan. Ferguson has said that she never pictured herself becoming a writer while growing up or during college. After she graduated from Asbury Theological Seminary, her husband took a temporary job in Ohio in 2011. What was meant to be a six-week move stretched into a year, leaving her alone in an extended-stay apartment with time, a laptop, and no real plan for filling the days.

Then a chance encounter with the Twilight phenomenon got her thinking about the power stories can have on readers. She started writing the next day and found she couldn't stop.

Ferguson spent years working on an early fantasy manuscript, then spent more time trying to place it with an agent. That book did not become her debut, but it taught her how much work a novel takes. After many rejections, she shifted toward romantic comedy, a genre that better matched her interest in big comic premises, heart, and characters who grow up a little while falling in love.

Her first published rom-com, The Dating Charade, arrived in 2019. It follows Cassie Everson and firefighter Jett Bentley, whose promising first date gets much more complicated when each unexpectedly becomes responsible for three children. The book brings foster care, family, and dating mishaps into the same story, setting a pattern for Ferguson's mix of humor and more grounded emotional stakes.

The situations only get more inventive from there. In The Cul-de-Sac War, neighboring rivals Bree Leake and Chip McBride turn their irritation into an escalating prank battle. Meet Me in the Margins takes readers inside a publishing house, where an editor secretly writing romance finds anonymous notes in the margins of her manuscript. Famous for a Living sends a social-media celebrity from New York to a snowy Montana national park after her public life falls apart.

Her later books keep returning to people whose careers, plans, or carefully built identities are under pressure. How to Plot a Payback puts a screenwriter beside the cheerful actress he thinks has ruined his life, while The Perfect Rom-Com follows a gifted ghostwriter trying to make space for her own ambitions. In Without a Clue, Ferguson adds a cozy mystery angle to the romantic comedy setup, trapping an assistant and amateur sleuth on a book cruise after a murder.

She also writes beyond adult romance. Her picture-book debut, Our Friendly Farmhouse, follows a family building a country home near the Appalachian Mountains, drawing on the farmhouse life she shares online. Ferguson lives in East Tennessee with her husband and five children. She has also taught Bible and Religion courses, and she is involved in film adaptations of two of her novels as an executive producer.

The common thread is simple: start with a funny question, give the characters a real problem underneath it, and let the people around them make everything more complicated.