RA Smyth Books in Order

If you want dark academy bully romance: Broken Trust → Brutal Lies → Beyond Vengeance → Break Free
If you like high school gangs and stalker tension: Three Divisions → Two Forces → One Family
If you prefer gritty gang mafia and older characters: Rebels and Rejects → Murder and Mayhem → Damaged and Deadly → Chaos and Carnage
If you want a college spin off after Pacific Prep: Pretty Spiteful → Pretty Vile → Pretty Lethal

RA Smyth writes the kind of dark, tangled romances that keep readers up far too late. Publishing under her initials but happily answering to Rachel, she lives in the UK with her husband and their golden retrievers, plotting new ways to put fictional characters through it. Her stories lean into contemporary settings, crime‑laced backdrops and heroines who refuse to stay victims, no matter how bad things get.

Her publishing journey kicked off in 2020 with Three Divisions, the first Crescentwood book, and she has moved at a relentless pace ever since. In just a few years she has built out several interconnected series, including the academy‑set Pacific Prep, the high school world of Crescentwood, the gang‑mafia saga Black Creek and the college‑age spin off The Ruthless Boys of Ridgeway. Each series has its own tone, but they all share a love of slow‑burn chaos, sharp twists and emotionally messy relationships.

Her heroines tend to arrive on the page already bruised by life. They have buried parents, criminal fathers, stalkers who know too much and pasts full of things polite people do not talk about. Instead of turning away from that damage, Rachel uses it as fuel. Hadley, Sophie, Sawyer and Emilia all start their stories on the back foot, yet every book is really about them clawing back control, setting their own terms and deciding who gets to stand beside them.

Crescentwood lays down many of the themes she returns to. Sophie is uprooted from poverty and dropped into a town ruled by gangs and corrupt politicians, where two golden boys hate her on sight and two more seem determined to shadow her every move. Across Three Divisions, Two Forces and One Family, Rachel folds in bullying, stalking and organised crime while slowly turning that hostile group of boys into the family Sophie chooses, without pretending the damage along the way is easy to live with.

With Pacific Prep, Rachel shifts to an elite academy on the West Coast and dials everything up. Hadley Parker arrives at the school on scholarship, carrying a past that has taught her how to fight and, if necessary, kill. The four princes of the school try to run her out, only to discover she is far from helpless. Over Broken Trust, Brutal Lies, Beyond Vengeance and Break Free, the story widens into secret organisations, buried family ties and a romance where Hadley is never forced to choose just one of the men who stand with her.

Black Creek takes that same world and ages it up into a full‑on gang‑mafia battleground. Sawyer works dangerous jobs in a town controlled by the Antonelli family, cares for her younger brother and moonlights as a vigilante who hunts predators in the dark. The series follows her uneasy alliance with the Reaper Rejects, the rival gang led by Cain and Oliver, and the way her life knots together with mafia heirs Dante and Enzo. It is bloody, grimy and packed with high‑stakes choices about loyalty and revenge.

Then there is Ridgeway, where Emilia Harrison flees to a private security firm run by men who have every reason to resent her. Pretty Spiteful, Pretty Vile and Pretty Lethal mix second‑chance tension, bodyguard romance and a secret society that does not like being crossed. Emilia’s stalker is only the beginning; the real danger comes from the polished elites who think they own the town and everyone in it.

If there is a through‑line in Rachel’s work, it is that love and rage are never far apart. Her books are full of found family, morally gray choices and big, cathartic confrontations, all told in straightforward, fast‑moving prose. Multi‑POV chapters let you live in more than one head, and she does not shy away from long, steamy scenes when the characters have earned them.

When she is not drafting or revising, Rachel is usually reading other people’s cliffhangers, chatting with readers online or sharing snippets and bonus scenes. She keeps most of her personal life private, but the small details she has shared – late‑night writing sessions, dog walks in the rain, an admitted weakness for incomplete series – all feed back into the worlds she builds on the page.