Sam Blake Books in Order

If you want the police series first: Little Bones → In Deep Water → No Turning Back
If you want a twisty standalone: Keep Your Eyes On Me → Remember My Name
If you like atmospheric mysteries: The Dark Room → The Mystery of Four → Three Little Birds
If you want YA suspense: Something Terrible Happened Last Night → Something's About to Blow Up
If you want high-stakes danger fast: High Pressure → The Killing Sense

Sam Blake is the crime writing name of Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin. She is originally from St Albans, in Hertfordshire, and has lived for many years near the Wicklow Mountains, close to Dublin. Long before readers knew her for thrillers, she had already built a working life around books, writers, and the business of getting stories into the world.

Writing came to her in a slightly sideways way. In 1999, while her husband was away sailing across the Atlantic for eight weeks, she began a novel. She has since said that first book was terrible, but it did the important job, it got her started. The novel that finally became her debut was actually the fifth full book she wrote.

That long run-up matters because Blake did not arrive in publishing from nowhere. She worked in event management, then in 2006 founded Inkwell Writers Workshops, which later became The Inkwell Group, a publishing consultancy. In 2011 she launched Writing.ie, an online resource that offers advice, opportunities, interviews, and practical help for writers. She also went on to found Murder One, Ireland's international crime writing festival.

She learned the trade from every angle.

Her breakthrough as Sam Blake came with Little Bones, the first Cathy Connolly novel. The book became a number one Irish bestseller and introduced a young Garda detective whose working life is full of risk, while her personal life is anything but tidy. Readers stayed with Cat through In Deep Water and No Turning Back, drawn by the mix of police procedure, emotional pressure, and a heroine who is bright, stubborn, and very human. Blake's books tend to move fast, but she gives her characters room to bruise.

She has also shown that she does not want to write the same book over and over. Keep Your Eyes On Me shifts into revenge thriller territory. The Dark Room turns a West Cork country house hotel into a place full of old secrets and uneasy alliances. The Mystery of Four leans into the country house murder tradition, while Three Little Birds brings in facial reconstruction expert Dr Carla Steele and a colder, forensic kind of suspense. For younger readers, she created the Raven's Hill School novels, beginning with Something Terrible Happened Last Night.

She likes pressure.

Across genres, certain things keep showing up. Blake writes strong women, complicated loyalties, family strain, hidden histories, and the fallout from bad decisions. She is also very good at using setting, not just as scenery, but as part of the tension, whether that means Dublin streets, a hotel in West Cork, or a private school in South County Dublin. Even when the plots get twisty, the emotional stakes stay close to home.

Alongside the fiction, she has stayed deeply involved in the wider writing community. She has worked as a literary scout, hosted the Behind the Bestseller podcast, served in author advocacy roles, and was elected chair of the Society of Authors in 2024. That work sits neatly beside the rest of her career. She has spent years helping writers find their footing, while also building a body of fiction that moves from police procedural to psychological suspense to YA mystery without losing its sense of pace.

These days she still lives near Dublin, at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains. That mix of publishing know-how and storyteller's instinct helps explain why her novels feel carefully built, but never mechanical.