Rea Frey Books in Order

If you want her signature domestic suspense: Not Her Daughter → Because You're Mine → Until I Find You
If you like family secrets and dark atmosphere: Secrets of Our House → When She's Gone → Dear Mother
If you prefer emotional what-if stories: The Other Year → In Every Life
If you're curious about her earlier nonfiction: The Cheat Sheet → Power Vegan → Detox Before You're Expecting

Rea Frey is a Nashville native who has spent much of her career circling one big question: what happens when family life breaks in ways nobody can ignore? As a kid, though, she was not planning on becoming a novelist. She has said she wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, and that writing felt like a hobby, not a job.

That changed when she left Tennessee for college and studied creative writing in Chicago. She wrote a novel before graduation, and it was published before she turned twenty-two. Frey has been open about the fact that the experience was not glamorous. She knew how to write. She did not yet know how publishing worked.

That early disappointment pushed her to learn the whole industry.

Over the years, Frey worked with literary agencies and publishers, took on ghostwriting and editing jobs, managed magazine editorial work, and reported on death row cases as a journalist. She also built a second career in wellness. Certified as a personal trainer and nutrition specialist at seventeen, she later wrote nonfiction books like Power Vegan and Detox Before You're Expecting.

She learned publishing from the inside, not just from the writer's desk.

Fiction pulled her back in a bigger way after she became a mother. Frey has said that Not Her Daughter, her 2018 breakout novel, felt like her true debut. It tells the story of a woman who kidnaps a little girl she believes is in danger, and it set the pattern for much of what followed. In books like Because You're Mine, Until I Find You, and Secrets of Our House, she keeps returning to mothers, children, secrets, and the split-second choices that can blow a life apart.

She does not stay in one lane. Some books lean into suspense, like Don't Forget Me, When She's Gone, and Dear Mother. Others, especially The Other Year and In Every Life, open up into parallel lives, grief, second chances, and the pull of what if. Either way, readers tend to get a mix of emotional stakes and fast-moving plots.

Outside her own novels, Frey is also the founder and CEO of Writeway, where she teaches writers the business side of getting published. She sometimes calls herself a book doula, which fits her approach. A lot of her work now is about helping authors understand contracts, career paths, and how to bring a book into the world without walking in blind.

These days she lives in Nashville with her husband and daughter. The city keeps showing up in her life even when the books travel elsewhere. So do the themes that run through her work, family pressure, buried fear, and the messy choices people make when love and survival get tangled together.