Teri Woods Books in Order

If you want the classic starting point: True to the Game → True to the Game II → True to the Game III
If you want a ruthless crime boss saga: Dutch → Dutch II: Angel's Revenge → International Gangster
If you want family empire wars: Deadly Reigns → Deadly Reigns II → Deadly Reigns III
If you want a tighter suspense story: Alibi → Alibi II

Teri Woods was born in Delaware and grew up in and around Philadelphia, spending much of her youth in West Philadelphia. The city stayed with her. Its street pressure, neighborhood codes, and sharp line between survival and ambition would later show up all through her fiction.

She did not come into publishing through the usual door.

In the early 1990s, while working as a legal secretary and paralegal in a Center City law firm, Woods wrote True to the Game. She was also raising her family, so writing had to fit around work, kids, and everything else. She sent the manuscript to more than twenty publishers over a span of years and kept hearing the same answer, no.

Then she changed the plan.

In 1998, Woods had copies of True to the Game made herself and started selling them by hand. She sold books out of the trunk of her car, took them directly to stores, and built readers one conversation at a time. What looked like a last resort turned into the foundation of her career. The book caught on through word of mouth, and that success grew into Teri Woods Publishing, which let her keep control of her work and later publish other writers too.

That backstory explains a lot about the novels. Woods writes with a strong sense of audience and momentum. Readers come to True to the Game for the mix of romance, danger, and the pull of street life. Dutch goes darker and bigger, with a criminal antihero at the center. Alibi tightens the focus into suspense, while Deadly Reigns turns organized crime into a family war.

Her fiction stays close to the ground even when the stakes get huge. Philadelphia, New Jersey, and nearby East Coast worlds matter in these books, not just as scenery but as pressure systems. She writes about people who want love, money, status, safety, and a second chance, and who usually cannot have all of them at once. Loyalty, betrayal, revenge, reinvention, and the cost of trying to get out are the themes that keep coming back.

Her reach eventually moved beyond hand selling and independent hustle. The success of her books helped her land a major publishing deal that brought several titles to a wider market. Her stories also reached film audiences. True to the Game was adapted for the screen, and Dutch followed. She later showed another side of her work with Saving My Money With Ginger Giraffe, a picture book for younger readers.

Woods has long been tied to the Philadelphia and South Jersey area, and author biographies have placed her in New Jersey while she continued writing and running her publishing business. That part of the story matters too. She was never just turning in manuscripts. She was figuring out production, distribution, and how to get books into readers' hands when the usual gatekeepers had already passed.

A lot of writer bios are really stories about approval. Hers is more about persistence, judgment, and knowing her audience before the industry fully caught up. That practical streak is one of the clearest things connecting Teri Woods the publisher and Teri Woods the novelist.