Shari Lapena Books in Order

If you want the breakout domestic thriller: The Couple Next Door → A Stranger in the House → The End of Her
If you like suspicious neighbors and suburbia: Someone We Know → Everyone Here Is Lying → Not a Happy Family
If you want a classic whodunit feel: An Unwanted Guest → What Have You Done?
If you're curious about her earlier, funnier novels: Things Go Flying → Happiness Economics

Shari Lapena took the scenic route to fiction. Before she became known for taut domestic suspense, she worked as a lawyer and an English teacher. She now writes full time from a farm in Ontario, where she lives with her husband.

She wanted to write long before any of that. As a child, she tore through Nancy Drew books and kept the idea of becoming a novelist in the back of her mind. Still, she has talked openly about taking a lot of detours before finally giving herself permission to try.

One of the big turning points came when she studied through Humber School for Writers and was paired with novelist David Adams Richards as a mentor. He worked with her on the manuscript that became Things Go Flying. The book was published in 2008, after years of learning the craft the slow way.

Her first books were funny before they were frightening.

Things Go Flying is a dark comedy about a struggling family, old secrets, and messages from the dead. Happiness Economics, published in 2011, follows a stalled poet, his high-powered economist wife, and a comic collision between art and money. That second novel was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, which tells you something about where Lapena started.

Then she switched gears.

She had long wanted to write a thriller, but for a while she wasn't sure she could pull one off because she doesn't outline heavily. When the premise for The Couple Next Door clicked, she wrote it fast, and it changed her career. The book became a huge international bestseller, sold millions of copies, and introduced a style she has kept sharpening ever since: ordinary people, one bad decision, and a whole neighborhood of secrets.

Readers who love Lapena usually come for that pressure-cooker setup. Someone We Know turns a quiet street inside out after a teenager starts slipping into neighbors' homes. In A Stranger in the House, a woman crashes her car and can't remember why she fled home. In An Unwanted Guest, a blizzard strands travelers in a Catskills inn as deaths pile up. In The End of Her and Not a Happy Family, marriage, money, and resentment make home feel anything but safe. In Everyone Here Is Lying and What Have You Done?, quiet communities start cracking open under the weight of rumor, guilt, and suspicion.

Across her books, the settings are often familiar on purpose: nice houses, respectable couples, tidy streets, small towns where everyone thinks they know everyone else. Then she starts tugging at the weak seams. Marriage, money, class, jealousy, parenting, and the stories people tell themselves all show up again and again.

Another nice detail about her process is that she writes to discover the story, not to prove a perfect plan. That helps explain why her novels move the way they do, with shifting suspicions, messy people, and twists that feel like trouble spreading room by room. Even now, after bestseller lists and international success, her work still begins with the same basic question: what happens if one secret slips out?