Tara Laskowski Books in Order

Tara Laskowski grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, a landscape that still shows up in her work, sometimes directly and sometimes just in the mood. She studied English and writing at Susquehanna University, then earned an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. At Mason, she also met fellow writer Art Taylor, who would later become her husband.

Before the novels, she built her career story by story. Her fiction appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Mid-American Review, and Flash Fiction International. In 2010, she won the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Prize, an early sign that readers and editors were already taking notice.

She was also born on Halloween.

That small fact feels right once you read her work. Even when she is writing suspense rather than straight horror, she likes places with a chill around the edges, beach towns in the off-season, perfect suburbs with rotten secrets, houses that seem to remember what happened inside them. She has said that horror is her first love as a reader, and you can feel that pull in the atmosphere.

Laskowski also spent much of the 2010s helping shape other writers' work as a longtime editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, an online journal devoted to flash fiction. Editing there, and writing her own very short stories, sharpened her sense of pace. She is good at getting into a scene fast, finding the uneasy detail, and ending on a note that keeps vibrating after the page is done.

Her early books show that range. Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons turns the language of etiquette guides into dark, funny stories about subjects polite society would rather ignore. Bystanders moves further into suspense and unease, following ordinary people as violence, fear, and bad luck push them out of the background and into the center of the story.

Then came the novels. One Night Gone, her 2019 debut, pairs a long-ago disappearance with a woman trying to rebuild her life in a wealthy Jersey Shore town, and it went on to win the Agatha, Macavity, and Anthony awards. The Mother Next Door takes a neat suburban cul-de-sac and loads it with clashing mothers, Halloween tension, and a past nobody wants exposed. The Weekend Retreat narrows the pressure even more, trapping a wealthy family and their partners at a winery estate where old resentments start turning dangerous.

She has never fully left short crime fiction behind.

Her story The Case of the Vanishing Professor won an Agatha Award, and The Long-Term Tenant won a Thriller Award. Across the books and stories, certain interests keep returning: women trying to start over, marriages under strain, class and privilege, communities that close ranks, and the way one violent act can throw hidden parts of a person into the open. She can be funny, but the humor usually arrives with teeth.

These days she lives in Virginia with Art Taylor, their son Dashiell, and two cats. She still loves spooky things, including horror movies and escape rooms, and that mix of playfulness and dread suits her writing well. The books are tense and atmospheric, but they are also grounded in people who want connection, safety, and one more chance to get their lives right.