Natalie Barelli Books in Order

If you want a twisty series about publishing and fame: Until I Met Her → After He Killed Me
If you love cold-case and podcast style mysteries: Missing Molly
If domestic revenge stories are your thing: The Loyal Wife → The Housekeeper → The Accident
If you prefer marriage and family secrets: Unfaithful → Unforgivable
If you want a newer standalone cat and mouse thriller: Finders Keepers

Natalie Barelli writes psychological thrillers and domestic noir, the kind of stories where an ordinary dinner table can hide the most dangerous secrets. She lives in Australia, in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, with an extended family and a steady stack of suspense novels nearby.

Before she was a full time author, Barelli worked as an IT consultant, the sort of job that kept her close to computers but far from the fictional crimes she loved. In her spare time she devoured psychological thrillers and kept one stubborn item on her bucket list, to write a novel of her own.

The push finally came during a long conversation with a friend about all the ambitions that never seem to make it off that list, and she chose the scariest one, to sit down and write a twisty psychological suspense story from start to finish.

That story became Until I Met Her, the first book in her Emma Fern series. It follows a shop owner pulled into a dangerous ghostwriting arrangement with superstar crime author Beatrice Johnson Greene, then forced to live with the lies that make her famous. Barelli has talked about how working with professional editors on that debut taught her to tighten plots, sharpen twists, and trust the darker instincts of the story.

She returned to Emma’s world in After He Killed Me, which picks up after the success of that first book and asks what happens when a carefully constructed public image begins to crack. Fame, marriage, and guilt collide as Emma’s husband Jim reveals secrets of his own, turning their relationship into a psychological chess match.

Away from Emma Fern, Barelli has written a run of stand alone thrillers that all orbit the same territory, ordinary women pushed into extraordinary moral corners. Missing Molly uses a true crime podcast to drag a long buried family tragedy back into the light. In The Housekeeper, a woman whose life was derailed as a teenager insinuates herself into her rival’s home under a false identity, while The Loyal Wife and The Accident explore how betrayal and one reckless decision can spiral far beyond anyone’s control.

Her later novels deepen those themes. In Unfaithful, a mathematician reeling from a student’s death clings to her unraveling marriage while someone uses anonymous messages to pull at every loose thread. Unforgivable centers on a stepmother who will do almost anything to protect the little girl she loves from a manipulative birth mother, and Finders Keepers follows a young woman whose lost teenage diary, full of dark secrets, resurfaces in the most public way possible.

Across these books, Barelli returns again and again to questions of identity, the stories people tell about themselves, and what happens when those stories are exposed as lies.

Readers often mention how easy it is to see themselves in her protagonists, even when those characters make terrible choices, and how quickly a familiar domestic scene can tilt into menace. Barelli balances that tension with flashes of dark humor, small details about family life, and a clear affection for her flawed, scheming characters. When she is not plotting new ways to upend a fictional marriage, she loves to cook, knits cheerfully but badly, rides her Vespa through the mountains, and, by her own admission, spends far too much time at the computer dreaming up the next twist.