Ren Richards Books in Order

If you want her adult psychological suspense: The Broken Ones
If you like dark family secrets and true crime angles: The Broken Ones
If you want the clearest place to start with Ren Richards: The Broken Ones

Ren Richards is the pen name Lauren DeStefano used for The Broken Ones, her move from bestselling YA and middle grade fiction into adult psychological suspense. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Connecticut, she has stayed close to the East Coast and built a career by following stories that feel a little strange, a little dark, and very human.

She earned a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from Albertus Magnus College. Writing started early, but publishing took time. Before her first novel reached readers, she wrote several unpublished books and kept going through a long run of rejection, the kind of apprenticeship that does not look glamorous but often shapes a writer's backbone.

A big turning point came when her agent suggested that the stories she was writing, adult fiction with young protagonists, might belong in YA, and told her to read The Hunger Games. DeStefano has said that advice helped things click. Her first published novel, Wither, arrived in 2011 and opened the Chemical Garden trilogy, a series that mixed dystopian stakes with intimate fears about family, control, illness, and the pressure to survive inside a damaged world.

That trilogy continued with Fever and Sever, and it helped make her a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Readers who connect with her work usually are not just coming for the premise. They are there for the uneasy mood, the trapped feeling, and the way her heroines keep searching for some scrap of agency even when the world around them is rigid, unfair, or quietly horrifying.

She does not tend to write safe little worlds.

In Perfect Ruin, the first book in the Internment series, she set a murder mystery inside a floating city built on rules and appearances. In middle grade novels like A Curious Tale of the In-Between and The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart, she kept the eerie atmosphere but shifted toward younger readers, writing about ghosts, friendship, grief, and children trying to make sense of what adults leave unsaid. Even when the audience changes, her stories keep circling the same deep interests: secrecy, loss, and the strange ways love can protect people or harm them.

Family is usually the pressure point.

Across her books, DeStefano returns to sisters, mothers, daughters, isolated settings, and people who feel boxed in by expectations they did not choose. That made her step into adult suspense feel natural. She has said she loved psychological thrillers long before she published one, reading The Silence of the Lambs, Kiss the Girls, and Stephen King novels on family road trips in high school. Under the Ren Richards name, The Broken Ones let her lean fully into that side of her reading life, with a story about a true crime writer whose carefully rebuilt identity starts to crack under the weight of an old disappearance.

She still lives in Connecticut, where she was born and raised. Away from the page, she has talked about unwinding with true crime, sewing, decorating, and crocheting more blankets than she probably needs. She has also said that when writer's block hits, sometimes the answer is as simple as buying paint and redoing a room. That mix of restlessness and practicality feels right for her work. The books are imaginative, but they are also built by someone who likes making things with her hands.