Natalie D Richards Books in Order

If you want a psychological thriller starting point: Six Months Later → Gone Too Far → My Secret to Tell
If you like creepy, closed-in settings: Five Total Strangers → We All Fall Down → Four Found Dead
If survival stories are your thing: One Was Lost → 49 Miles Alone
If you love puzzles and buried secrets: Seven Dirty Secrets → What You Hide → Two Perfect Lies
If you’re picking for middle grade readers (~8–12): 15 Secrets to Survival → Survive This Safari

Natalie D. Richards is an Ohio-born author who writes fast-paced young adult thrillers and middle grade adventures that keep readers turning pages late into the night. Her novels include New York Times bestsellers Five Total Strangers and Seven Dirty Secrets, as well as the Edgar Award–winning 49 Miles Alone.

Her love of storytelling goes back to elementary school, when she won a second-grade writing contest with a tongue-twisting tale about Barbara Frances Bizzlefishes. That small win stuck with her, even while life pushed her toward more practical kinds of writing.

For years she wrote polished but forgettable business documents and realized that the work used her skills but never really lit her up.

Eventually she gave herself permission to try the thing that had always scared and excited her most: making things up. Late nights and early mornings turned into a first full draft, then another, until her debut novel Six Months Later introduced readers to her blend of psychological tension, romance, and moral gray areas. That book was quickly followed by Gone Too Far, My Secret to Tell, and One Was Lost, each centering on teens whose ordinary lives are knocked off course by one terrible choice or unexplained event.

In her later young adult work, she pushes characters into even more claustrophobic and dangerous spaces. We All Fall Down traps two former friends in the shadow of a haunted bridge and the accident that tore them apart. What You Hide draws two teens together in an Ohio library where homelessness, family secrets, and eerie after-hours events collide. Holiday thriller Five Total Strangers strands five teens in a car during a blizzard, while Seven Dirty Secrets turns a birthday scavenger hunt into a deadly reckoning. Four Found Dead locks a group of theater employees inside a crumbling mall with a killer, and 49 Miles Alone sends two cousins into the Utah backcountry, where surviving the landscape is only half the battle.

Richards also writes for younger readers. Her middle grade debut, 15 Secrets to Survival, follows four reluctant teammates and a toddler through a wintry Montana wilderness when a planned team-building trip goes wrong. Survive This Safari shifts the action to a zoo-based escape challenge, mixing animal facts, tricky puzzles, and a runaway baby elephant to show how bravery can look like speaking up, asking for help, or trusting the right people.

Across all of these stories, her favorite things to explore are fear, friendship, and the moment a character realizes they are braver than they thought. The scares are real—stalkers, storms, locked doors—but so are the quieter pressures of grades, expectations, mental health, and grief.

On the craft side, she freely admits she writes first drafts very much by the seat of her pants, following her characters into trouble and figuring out the twists alongside them. Revision is where she leans on tools like the Hero’s Journey, three-act structure, timelines, and color-coded notes to tighten the plot and make sure every scare and reveal has earned its place.

Today she lives in Ohio with her three children and Wookiee, the very large dog who often wanders into her school visit stories and event photos. When she’s not drafting a new book, she visits classrooms, libraries, and writing groups to talk honestly about process, rejection, and the strange joy of scaring yourself on the page. For readers who like their mysteries twisty but full of heart, her books offer high stakes, vivid settings, and the steady sense that even in the darkest moments, someone is still fighting to make it out.