Tara Moss Books in Order

If you want postwar historical crime with a feminist PI: The War Widow/ Dead Man Switch → The Ghosts of Paris → The Italian Secret
If you like gritty serial-killer thrillers: Fetish → Split → Covet → Hit → Siren → Assassin
If you prefer gothic urban fantasy: The Blood Countess → The Spider Goddess → The Skeleton Key → The Cobra Queen
If you want her feminist nonfiction: The Fictional Woman → Speaking Out

Tara Moss was born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where she grew up reading mysteries and scribbling scary stories in school notebooks. Storytelling was an early habit, long before she knew it would become her job.

As a teenager she began working as a fashion model and spent years traveling between major cities. The work paid the bills, but it also showed her how quickly people will judge a woman on her appearance alone, an idea that would later surface in both her fiction and nonfiction.

After moving to Australia in the 1990s she shifted her focus to writing. In her mid-twenties she drafted her debut crime novel Fetish, introducing Canadian model and forensic psychology student Makedde 'Mak' Vanderwall and starting a long-running series of forensic thrillers published around the world.

In the Mak Vanderwall books, Moss leans on her own experience of the fashion industry and her interest in forensics. Mak moves between catwalks and crime scenes, dealing with serial predators, corrupt powerbrokers and the messy emotional fallout of surviving violence, in plots that mix pace, procedural detail and a dark sense of humor.

She later turned to paranormal and historical stories. The Pandora English novels follow a small-town orphan who lands a job at a New York fashion magazine and discovers a hidden world of ghosts, necromancers and gothic glamour. More recently, the Billie Walker mysteries shift the action to postwar Sydney, where a widowed former war reporter runs her late father's inquiry agency in a city full of rationing, jazz clubs and unpunished wartime crimes.

Alongside her fiction Moss writes nonfiction that draws directly on her life. In The Fictional Woman she blends memoir with research to examine the labels pinned to women in public life and the stories those labels erase. Speaking Out is a practical handbook for women and girls who want to be heard in meetings, media interviews and online spaces, with tools for preparing a message and staying safer while they deliver it.

Advocacy runs through all of this work. Moss has spent years speaking about gender, violence and representation, and she has served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and later as a National Ambassador for Child Survival, visiting hospitals, schools and refugee camps in that role. She has also been an ambassador for the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children and has received awards for her writing on human rights and for helping put issues like refugee policy and online abuse into wider public view.

Her approach to research is famously hands-on. For different books she has toured police academies, ridden in squad cars, visited morgues and courtrooms, trained for her private investigator licence and even learned race driving, all to better understand the worlds her characters move through. She has also hosted several documentary and interview series on television and audio, including true crime shows and a podcast that digs into real investigations.

In the mid 2010s Moss developed complex regional pain syndrome, a severe chronic pain condition that left her using a wheelchair and walking stick for years. She documented that experience publicly, using her platform to normalise mobility aids and talk about disability, and later wrote about returning to walking after the condition went into remission.

Today she also works under her full name, Tara Rae Moss, as a holistic practitioner and funeral celebrant, while continuing to write, speak and mentor. A dual Canadian and Australian citizen, she divides her time between New South Wales and her hometown of Victoria, where she lives with her family and keeps finding new ways to tell stories about resilience, justice and women who refuse to stay quiet.