Simone St James Books in Order

If you want the classic postwar gothic feel: The Haunting of Maddy Clare → An Inquiry Into Love and Death → Silence for the Dead → The Other Side of Midnight
If you like dual timelines and buried secrets: The Broken Girls → The Sun Down Motel → The Book of Cold Cases
If you want a fast modern supernatural thriller: Murder Road → A Box Full of Darkness
If you want a short sampler first: Ghost 19

Simone St. James is a Canadian novelist who made her name by blending ghost stories, mysteries, and emotional suspense. Her books are built around unanswered questions, a vanished person, a strange death, a room nobody wants to enter, and she has a knack for making the supernatural feel close enough to brush your sleeve.

Before fiction became her full-time job, she spent about twenty years working behind the scenes in television. She wrote around that career, in the leftover hours, and kept going through years of rejection before the publishing side finally caught up with the work.

She kept at it.

James has said she wrote her first ghost story in high school, and it was about a haunted library. Later, as an adult reader, she wanted a novel that was creepy but not gory, with romance in the mix and a strong gothic mood. When she could not quite find the book she was looking for, she decided to write it herself.

That book became The Haunting of Maddy Clare, her 2012 debut. It won two RITA Awards and an Arthur Ellis Award, a strong start for a writer who had already spent plenty of time learning patience. Her next novel, An Inquiry Into Love and Death, was nominated for another Arthur Ellis Award, and it helped confirm that this was not a one-book fluke.

Those early novels, along with Silence for the Dead and The Other Side of Midnight, show what many readers first loved about her work. They are set in England after the First World War, full of damaged veterans, clever young women, lonely houses, séances, and secrets that have had years to rot in private. The romantic thread matters, but so does the mystery, and so do the ghosts.

Then she widened the map.

With Lost Among the Living and especially The Broken Girls, James began leaning harder into suspense with bigger casts, dual timelines, and investigations that reach across decades. The Broken Girls ties a haunted Vermont boarding school to a journalist's search for the truth about her sister. The Sun Down Motel moved that energy to a haunted roadside motel in upstate New York and became one of her biggest breakout books. The Book of Cold Cases brought in true crime culture, an acquitted murder suspect, and a house that feels wrong the minute someone steps inside. Murder Road and A Box Full of Darkness keep pushing toward sharper, more modern supernatural thrillers.

Across all of these books, certain things show up again and again. She writes about women who are underestimated, people living with grief, siblings and found families, and characters who cannot leave the past alone because the past is not done with them. She likes isolated settings, old buildings, small towns with bad memories, and the moment when the rational explanation starts to look thin.

Readers often come for the scares, but they stay for the mix of atmosphere and momentum. James can do creeping dread, but she also knows how to keep a plot moving, which is a big part of why her books work for mystery readers as well as horror fans. Even when the setup is paranormal, the feelings underneath are familiar: guilt, loneliness, love, curiosity, and the stubborn need to know what really happened. Today she lives just outside Toronto with her husband and a spoiled rescue cat, and she has mentioned a fondness for sushi, rainy days, coffee, and old gothic novels.