Sharon Wray Books in Order

If you want the core series in publication order: Every Deep Desire → One Dark Wish → In Search of Truth
If you want the earliest story in this world: The Christmas Lily → Every Deep Desire → Love's Last Kiss
If you want a darker, standalone-style entry: Love's Last Kiss → One Dark Wish
If you like buried history and treasure hunts: One Dark Wish → In Search of Truth

Sharon Wray grew up in New Jersey, the oldest of two girls, and she has said she learned early how to keep a household moving because her parents worked long, demanding schedules. That practical, take-charge streak never really left her. It helps explain the mix of careers she tried before fiction took over, and it also shows up in her heroines, who are usually the people keeping things together when everyone else is falling apart.

Before publication, Wray built a life that moved through libraries, archives, fashion, and travel. She earned a graduate degree in library science at Rutgers, worked as a chemical and patent librarian, and later did archival work for the Newspaper Association of America. She also studied dress design in the couture houses of Paris and spent time in South Korea working for the American Red Cross, which is the kind of résumé that gives a writer plenty of material to draw from.

She spent a long time, by her own account, trying not to become a writer.

The spark came from both books and television. Wray has said that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is what first pushed her toward writing, and after years of work, travel, military-family life, and raising twins, she finally stopped ignoring the characters in her head. She has also spoken very openly about process: she loves outlining and revision, even if the messy first draft can take a while, which makes her journey feel refreshingly normal and hard-won.

That slow build paid off when Every Deep Desire was published in 2018 and introduced readers to her Deadly Force world. It was a strong start for the kind of fiction she clearly enjoys most, romantic suspense with research behind it, damaged heroes, capable women, and danger that feels personal as well as plot-driven. She later expanded that world with books like One Dark Wish, In Search of Truth, and Love's Last Kiss.

What readers often respond to in those books is the blend. Wray likes action, but she also likes history, myth, buried secrets, and relationships with a lot of unfinished business. Her stories often pair former soldiers or otherwise battle-scarred men with women who keep asking the next question, even when it would be safer not to. The result is romance that moves fast, but still has room for grief, guilt, loyalty, and second chances.

There is also a clear pattern to her settings and themes. Coastal Georgia, old houses, marshes, hidden papers, pirate ciphers, family wounds, secret organizations, and Shakespearean echoes all turn up across the Deadly Force books. Even a holiday story like The Christmas Lily still carries that mix of warmth and unease. She has described her fiction as modern myths, and that feels like a good shorthand for what she is doing.

She likes love stories that have history in their pockets and trouble at the door.

Wray does not seem interested in tidy, friction-free romance. Her books return again and again to wounded communities, broken systems, and the cost of silence. She writes about people who have been lied to, shut out, or told to endure quietly, and then asks what happens when they stop accepting that role. That moral question, more than any single trope, is what ties together her suspense novels, contemporary romance, gothic women's fiction, and other work.

These days she lives in Virginia, a New Jersey native married to a man from Charleston, South Carolina, and is a wife, mother of twins, and caretaker of rescue dogs. She still sounds like a librarian at heart too, always circling back to books, history, and research. If you like romantic suspense that mixes heart, danger, and a real affection for old stories, Sharon Wray is easy to settle into.