Rebecca Alexander Books in Order

If you want emotional island stories: Secrets of the Cottage by the Sea → Memories of the Cottage by the Sea → Dreams of the Cottage by the Sea
If you like supernatural historical mystery: The Secrets of Life and Death → The Secrets of Blood and Bone → The Secrets of Time and Fate
If you want crime with archaeology: A Baby’s Bones → A Shroud of Leaves
If you want countryside secrets and second chances: Secrets of Foxglove Cottage → Memories of Heather House → The Lost Letter of Bluebell Farm

Rebecca Alexander was born in Malta and grew up on the south coast of England. She has said that the idea of writing grabbed her early, and she wrote her first book at nineteen. Even then, the things that pulled her in were not tidy or ordinary, they were eerie, emotional, and a little hard to explain.

Before fiction became the center of her working life, Alexander trained in psychology and education and worked as a psychologist and lecturer. That background matters when you read her novels. She is plainly interested in why people believe what they believe, how fear shapes behavior, and what happens when grief, obsession, guilt, or secrecy start pressing on ordinary lives.

That mix of science and superstition runs right through her fiction.

In 2011, after years of raising and home educating six children, she took writing more seriously and began an MA in Creative Writing. Around the same time, The Secrets of Life and Death was a runner-up in the Mslexia novel competition, which helped lead to an agent and a three-book deal. The novel was published in 2013, followed by The Secrets of Blood and Bone and The Secrets of Time and Fate.

Those early books show one side of her very clearly. They blend present-day danger with sixteenth-century sorcery, occult history, and real historical figures such as John Dee, Edward Kelley, and Elizabeth Báthory. What makes them work is not just the magic, though. Alexander likes putting practical people in impossible situations and then asking what they will sacrifice to survive.

She later moved toward straight crime with A Baby's Bones and A Shroud of Leaves, the Sage Westfield novels. These books follow a forensic archaeologist as she uncovers buried crimes that refuse to stay buried. They keep the dual-timeline structure of her earlier work, but trade open supernatural suspense for cold cases, old sites, and the slow satisfaction of evidence coming together.

She seems happiest when a present-day puzzle has old roots.

More recently, Alexander has written emotional women's fiction set on remote islands and in the English countryside. Books like Secrets of the Cottage by the Sea, Memories of the Cottage by the Sea, Secrets of Foxglove Cottage, and Memories of Heather House bring together modern women at crossroads in their lives, wartime letters and diaries, old houses with long memories, and the possibility of starting again. Readers who enjoy her newer work usually come for the setting and stay for the family secrets, the gentle romance, and the sense that the past is never quite finished speaking.

She now lives in Devon with her husband and continues to write across genres. She has also taught creative writing, and outside books she paints, works with textiles, bakes, and grows fruit. Home, by all accounts, is an old house with sea views, plenty of creaks, and more than enough stories to keep a novelist busy.