Taylor Adams Books in Order

If you want the signature Taylor Adams thriller: No Exit → Hairpin Bridge → The Last Word
If you like survival stories in brutal settings: Eyeshot → No Exit → Her Last Breath
If you want the horror-leaning books: Our Last Night → The Last Word → Her Last Breath
If you want to start from the beginning: Eyeshot → Our Last Night → No Exit → Hairpin Bridge
Then continue with the newer books: The Last Word → Her Last Breath

Taylor Adams grew up near Seattle, and Washington never feels very far from his work. He has said he fell for stories early, and Jurassic Park was one of the books that really grabbed him. One of his first tries at a novel involved Mount Rainier erupting and wiping out the surrounding area. It never became a book, but the impulse was already there: take ordinary people, trap them somewhere bad, and see what they do next.

Before novels, Adams worked in film and television and spent years learning how stories move on screen. He studied screenwriting at Eastern Washington University, where he received the Excellence in Screenwriting Award and the Edmund G. Yarwood Award. In 2008 he wrote and directed the short film And I Feel Fine, and his film work screened at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival. Those early years gave him a strong feel for pacing, setup, and visual tension.

That movie background really shows.

Adams's first novel, Eyeshot, is a lean survival thriller about a young couple stranded in the Mojave Desert with a sniper somewhere out in the distance. His next book, Our Last Night, heads in a stranger direction, following ghost hunter Dan Rupley, a cursed rifle, and a deadline of just twenty-four hours. Even in those early books, Adams was clearly drawn to tight spaces, ticking clocks, and characters who have to keep moving even when they are scared.

He likes pressure.

Then No Exit opened him up to a much wider readership. The setup is brutally simple: Darby Thorne gets stranded at a rest stop during a blizzard, finds a kidnapped girl locked in a van, and realizes one of the strangers inside is the kidnapper. Readers connected with the speed, the nasty little twists, and the way Adams never lets the tension sag. The novel went on to be published in 32 languages and was adapted into a 2022 film.

He kept building on that kind of high-stakes suspense. Hairpin Bridge follows Lena Nguyen as she questions the highway patrolman tied to her twin sister's death. The Last Word turns a one-star review into a stalking nightmare at an isolated beach house on the rainy Washington coast. In Her Last Breath, released in 2026, Adams sends best friends Tess and Allie into a cave system and makes the darkness, the rock, and the secrets between them do a lot of the work. Different plots, same engine: survival, bad odds, and people forced to think fast.

Adams still lives in Washington State with his family, and the Pacific Northwest keeps showing up in his fiction, even when the books range farther afield. What links the novels is not a recurring detective or a shared universe. It is the feeling that the walls are closing in, whether the trap is snow, desert, isolation, or stone. If you like thrillers that move hard, stay focused, and drop regular people into impossible situations, his books make a very clear case for where to start.