Michelle Gagnon Books in Order

Michelle Gagnon writes thrillers for teens and adults, with stories that move from FBI investigations to hacker conspiracies, haunted mansions, and dangerous Las Vegas motels. She has Rhode Island roots and describes herself, with a little qualification, as a native Rhode Islander.

Before writing novels, Gagnon held an unusually varied list of jobs. She has worked as a modern dancer, bartender, dog walker, model, personal trainer, freelance journalist, and performer at a Russian supper club. It is a résumé with plenty of material for a conversation starter, and she has joked that she was only middling at many of those jobs.

She graduated from Wesleyan University, then began publishing adult suspense novels with The Tunnels in 2007. The book introduced FBI Special Agent Kelly Jones, who returns to her New England alma mater when ritualized killings turn the tunnels beneath the campus into a crime scene.

Gagnon has kept the danger close to ordinary life.

The Kelly Jones novels, including Boneyard, The Gatekeeper, and Kidnap & Ransom, follow an investigator dealing with serial killers, mass graves, kidnappings, and a domestic terror plot. These books are direct, high-pressure procedurals, but they also give Jones room to wrestle with fear, trust, and the cost of repeatedly stepping toward violence rather than away from it.

Gagnon later turned to teen fiction with the Persefone trilogy, beginning with Don't Turn Around. It centers on Noa, a teenage hacker who wakes up injured and unable to remember how she got there, then discovers that vulnerable young people are being pulled into a corporate experiment. Peter, another hacker, becomes an important ally as the pair try to expose the people behind Project Persephone. Don't Look Now and Don't Let Go continue that fight, with digital surveillance, friendship, and life-or-death choices all in the mix.

She also likes putting familiar stories in stranger rooms.

In Strangelets, teens from far-apart places wake in an abandoned hospital and find themselves trapped in a bleak future. Unearthly Things reworks elements of Jane Eyre through Janie Mason, a surfer from Hawaii sent to live with an unsettling wealthy family in San Francisco. More recently, Gagnon returned to adult crime fiction with Killing Me and Slaying You, darkly funny thrillers about Amber Jamison and Grace, two reluctant allies who keep finding themselves in the orbit of serial killers.

Her books often put resourceful people under intense pressure, whether they are federal agents, teenagers with coding skills, or women trying to outrun the past. The settings change, but the question is often the same: who can you trust when the people with the most power are hiding the truth?

Gagnon lives in Los Angeles with her family and many pets. She has served as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for young people in foster care, with a focus on LGBTQ+ transitional-age youth, and has pursued graduate study in clinical psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles.