Susan Alice Bickford Books in Order

Susan Alice Bickford was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Central New York, a landscape that later became central to her fiction. The small towns, hard winters, back roads, and close family ties of the region give her suspense stories a solid, lived-in feel.

Before fiction took over, Bickford was drawn to visual art and narrative. She started out as a painter, then discovered computer graphics and animation, which led her to Silicon Valley. There she worked in a range of engineering and management jobs and eventually became an executive at a technology company.

Writing arrived during a break from that demanding career. She began putting stories on the page, went back to work, and found she still could not stop writing. At first she was not sure of her genre, but a story about a young woman needing to escape her family showed her where her interest lay: crime, danger, and women finding a way through.

That shift became a second career, and it stuck.

Her debut, A Short Time to Die, came out in 2017. It moves between the aftermath of a teen girl's flight from danger in rural New York and Detective Vanessa Alba's California investigation, which pulls her back toward the Finger Lakes. Readers who enjoy tangled family histories, cold cases, and a strong sense of place will find the book focused on both the mystery and the people trapped inside it. It was nominated for the 2018 Left Coast Crime Best Debut Novel award.

The book also carries a personal spark. Bickford has said an unsolved tragedy involving two classmates from her high-school years stayed with her for decades and helped inspire its opening concern with the vulnerability of young women. She has been clear that the novel is fictional, but that early memory helped lead her toward the story she wanted to tell.

Her second novel, Dread of Winter, followed in 2019 and was nominated for an Edgar Award in the Best Paperback Original category. It follows Sydney Lucerno's return to the remote New York town she left behind, where addiction, family secrets, and an unexpected half-sister complicate every decision. The setting is brutally cold, but the real pressure comes from the past refusing to stay put.

Across her fiction, Bickford returns to rural parts of New York State and New England. Her protagonists are often resourceful women dealing with old loyalties, frightened communities, and the uncomfortable ways family trouble can spread. She also writes short fiction, with work appearing in anthologies including Fish Out of Water, Fishy Business, The Fish That Got Away, and Invasive Species, as well as The Saturday Evening Post.

She is a full-time author and remains interested in high tech. Bickford has served as president of the Northern California chapter of Sisters in Crime, and she divides her time between Silicon Valley and her family's Vermont home base. Those two places, high-tech California and rural New England, help explain the range of landscapes in her work.

Her books do not treat place as mere scenery. A foggy road, a shuttered hometown, or a frozen lake can narrow a character's choices fast. That mix of landscape, pressure, and persistence is a useful way into her work for new readers.