Roz Nay Books in Order

Roz Nay was born in Eastbourne, England, and grew up in the UK before building a life in Canada. Her path to publishing wasn't a straight line. She has lived and worked in Africa, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, experiences that later gave her thrillers a strong sense of place.

Before writing novels, Nay worked as a high school teacher. She later worked in child protection in British Columbia, a job that brought her close to the complicated pressures families can carry behind closed doors.

That background shows up in her fiction. Nay is interested in ordinary people whose lives tilt suddenly off course, especially when old loyalties, grief, secrets, and bad decisions refuse to stay buried.

Her first novel, Our Little Secret, began as a short piece written during a creative-writing course at Selkirk College in 2012. The story grew into a psychological thriller about Angela Petitjean, a woman questioned by police after her former boyfriend's wife goes missing. The book won the Douglas Kennedy Prize for best foreign thriller in France and was nominated for both the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Mystery and the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award.

Nay followed it with Hurry Home, a tense story about estranged sisters Alex and Ruth Van Ness, whose reunion pulls a shared childhood secret into the present. Her time in child protection helped inform the novel's concern with vulnerable children, family responsibility, and the gap between a seemingly settled life and what is really happening underneath it.

Travel and isolation are also key parts of Nay's work. In The Hunted, a grieving young woman travels with her boyfriend to a remote island near Tanzania, where a new friendship turns threatening. The Offing moves the pressure to Australia's tropical waters, following two friends who join the crew of a small yacht and begin to suspect they are trapped with people they cannot trust.

The settings may change, but the questions tend to stay close to home: Who is telling the truth? How much can a relationship survive? What happens when the past catches up?

In 2026, Nay began the Madam Clerk Mysteries with All Rise for Murder, shifting into a lighter, small-town mystery mode. The series follows Maude Kirby, a newly hired courthouse clerk in British Columbia, and the three generations of Kirby women around her. It keeps Nay's interest in secrets and messy family ties, but brings more humor to the investigation.

Nay now lives in British Columbia with her husband and two children. Her books range from dark domestic suspense to travel-set danger and cozy mystery, but they share a fondness for flawed people, uneasy relationships, and the trouble that starts when someone decides the truth can wait.