Susan Walter Books in Order

Susan Walter was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and grew up in Massachusetts with a childhood shaped by violin practice. For a long time, music looked like the plan. It did not stick. She went on to Harvard, where she studied government, but the bigger lesson may have been that creative detours are sometimes the real path.

Early on, she thought TV news might be her future. She interned at a local station hoping to work on air, but the audition did not go well, and she ended up writing and producing promos instead. It sounds like a small twist, but it pushed her toward the part of the job she really liked, shaping story, tone, and pace.

Then came Los Angeles. Walter moved west for sunshine and a reset, and spent years working her way through film and television production. She worked as an assistant director, did development work, wrote scripts, and eventually started directing too. By her own telling, she realized the writers were having more fun than everyone else, so she followed that instinct.

She definitely did not take the straight road.

Her screen career reached a new stage with All I Wish, the film she wrote and directed, starring Sharon Stone and Tony Goldwyn. The movie helped establish her as more than a behind-the-scenes worker, and it also showed something that carries into her books: she likes stories about women trying to hold themselves together when life gets messy, public, or both. That mix of pressure, wit, and emotional fallout shows up again and again in her fiction.

Walter turned to novels during the pandemic, and the change seems to have fit. Her debut, Good as Dead, drops an ordinary woman into a hit-and-run cover-up and a very expensive silence. Over Her Dead Body stays close to Hollywood, following a struggling actress who inherits money from a dead casting director and quickly learns that good luck can be dangerous. In Lie by the Pool, she takes a broke widow, a Beverly Hills pool house, and one dead body, then lets the tension build from there.

Her later books widen the map. Running Cold heads to Banff for snow, grief, and a murder that traps a former Olympian in the wrong place at the wrong time. Murder at 30,000 Feet goes even tighter, turning a flight to Puerto Rico into a locked-room nightmare in the sky. Then there is Letters from Strangers, which steps away from pure thriller territory and leans into family secrets, loss, and identity. Walter has said that novel grew out of a real shock after her father's death, when she found secret letters in his desk and started asking hard questions.

She likes putting capable women under impossible pressure.

Across her books, you can see the patterns. Secrets spread. Money complicates everything. Nice houses are rarely safe. California glamour often hides rot, but colder places work for her too, because isolation sharpens fear. Even when the plots are twisty, the emotional core stays clear: people want safety, truth, and a second chance, and they do not always get them in that order.

Walter lives in Los Angeles and still writes for film and television as well as books. She has also kept some very Massachusetts habits, including a devotion to Red Sox baseball and a serious coffee routine. That mix, Hollywood craft on one side, Boston energy on the other, feels like a good key to her work. The stories are polished and cinematic, but they also move fast and know how to talk like real people.