Sam Carrington Books in Order

If you want the breakthrough book: Saving Sophie → Bad Sister
If you like family secrets and motherhood themes: One Little Lie → The Missing Wife
If you want a small-town past-coming-back thriller: I Dare You
If you prefer claustrophobic domestic suspense: The Open House → The Couple on Maple Drive → The Girl in the Photo

Sam Carrington is a psychological thriller writer from Devon. She has said she grew up in Highweek, near Newton Abbot, and she still lives in Devon, which helps explain why so many of her books feel rooted in the towns, villages, and uneasy edges of the south west.

Before fiction took over, Carrington spent years in jobs that put her close to stress, trauma, and the ways people hide what they are really thinking. She worked for the NHS for fifteen years and qualified as a nurse. Later, after completing a psychology degree, she moved into the prison service and worked with offenders in behaviour programmes.

It was not a straight line into publishing.

She has spoken about how that prison work changed the way she looked at fear, shame, manipulation, and self-protection. Those pressures show up again and again in her novels. Eventually she stepped away from that job to spend more time with her family and to have a real go at the thing she had wanted for years, writing fiction.

That decision paid off with Saving Sophie, her debut thriller, published in 2016. The book follows a mother trying to protect her teenage daughter after a night out turns into something much darker. It became a Kindle bestseller, and Carrington was named an Amazon Rising Star in 2016, which gave her a strong start with thriller readers.

She kept building from there. Bad Sister digs into buried family trauma and the long shadow of a house fire. One Little Lie looks at grief, guilt, and the impossible question of whether a parent can ever fully know their child. In The Missing Wife, a surprise birthday party becomes the start of a messy disappearance story, while I Dare You turns a childhood dare and an old conviction into a tense return-to-the-village mystery.

Then came books like The Open House, which makes a familiar property viewing feel quietly sinister, The Couple on Maple Drive, about a woman recovering from a violent attack, and The Girl in the Photo, built around a mother, a missing child, and the possibility that the whole story is not what it seems. Readers tend to come to Carrington for domestic settings, sharp hooks, and secrets that keep shifting shape.

Ordinary lives are rarely safe in a Sam Carrington novel.

A lot of her fiction circles the same fears: what parents will do for their children, how memory can fail us, and how quickly trust can crack inside a family or a small community. She often uses Devon settings, or fictional places clearly inspired by south Devon and Dartmoor, which gives the books a grounded feel even when the plots get very dark.

She still lives in Devon with her husband, and her family life has changed alongside her writing career. Her children are grown, she has spoken about becoming a grandmother, and home also includes two border terriers and a cat. It is a nice contrast to the worlds she writes, which are full of locked doors, bad decisions, and people who know more than they say.