Nancy Star Books in Order

If you want kid-friendly mysteries: The Case of the Missing Pumpkins → The Case of the Thanksgiving Thief → Mystery of the Snow Day Bigfoot
If you like media-world whodunits: Up Next → Now This
If you want a family saga with buried secrets: Sisters One, Two, Three → Rules for Moving
If you want sharp suburban comedy: Carpool Diem

Nancy Star grew up in Queens, New York, and started writing young. While she was a student at Francis Lewis High School, she wrote a full book-length story on a roll of paper towels and gave it to her best friend. The manuscript disappeared, which is the kind of lesson a future novelist does not forget.

She kept writing anyway.

Before fiction took over, Star spent more than a decade in the movie business. She worked at The Ladd Company and later at the Samuel Goldwyn Company, reading stories, scouting material, and helping think through adaptations in New York and London. It put her close to writers and close to the mechanics of plot, and it also taught her how much a story owes its audience. Films connected to that stretch of her career included Blade Runner, Chariots of Fire, Body Heat, and The Right Stuff.

Her first published book was not a novel at all. It was The International Guide to Tipping, a practical book that grew out of her own travel problem: she was going abroad often and never quite knew who to tip, or how much. She wrote it in the early morning hours while still working in film, which says a lot about how determined she was to make room for writing.

Then came fiction. Buried Lives leans into memory, fear, and the way the past can break into ordinary life. After that she created May Morrison, the overworked talk-show producer at the center of Up Next and Now This. Those books use the daytime television world as both setting and pressure cooker, mixing murder plots with the daily mess of jobs, bosses, commutes, and child care. A brief adventure in the world of TV talk shows, after she was invited and then uninvited to appear as a tipping expert, helped spark the idea for Up Next.

She has always seemed interested in what happens when capable women are asked to hold too much together at once.

That thread keeps running through her later work. She wrote the Calendar Club Mysteries for younger readers, giving Casey, Leon, and Dottie small-town cases to solve across the year. In Carpool Diem, she turns suburban parenting and youth sports into comedy with teeth. In Sisters One, Two, Three, she follows a family marked by an old tragedy on Martha's Vineyard, and the novel became one of the biggest books of her career, landing on a top ten print bestseller list in 2016. Rules for Moving stays with family strain too, following advice columnist Lane Meckler as grief, motherhood, and old secrets collide.

Across all of it, Star returns to a few things again and again: family secrets, people reinventing themselves, the push and pull between work and home, and the strange way humor can live right next to fear. Her settings often come back to New York, New Jersey, and Martha's Vineyard, places that suit stories about people who look fine on the surface and are carrying far more underneath. In addition to her novels, she has published essays in papers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Money, and Family Circle. Recent author bios place her in New Jersey and on Martha's Vineyard with her husband.