Toby Neal (Emily Kimelman) Books in Order

Toby Neal and Emily Kimelman meet most directly in the Scorch collaboration, a survival romance thriller series published under the names Toby Jane and Emily Reed. This page helps connect those books to the wider work of both writers, especially for readers who know Kimelman from Sydney Rye or Neal from her Hawaii-based crime fiction.

Neal's fiction covers several lanes. Her Paradise Crime stories follow investigators and ordinary people dealing with murder, corruption, family damage, and danger across Hawaii. Her work often uses the islands as a real, complicated setting rather than a postcard backdrop. A therapist by profession, she brings an interest in stress, motive, and recovery to characters who are rarely having an easy week.

Kimelman brings a different but compatible energy.

Her Sydney Rye novels center on a vigilante private investigator and her dog, Blue, while her Starstruck books mix Hollywood ambition with espionage. Both writers are interested in women under pressure, danger that has personal consequences, and relationships that change when someone is forced to act fast. In Scorch, those interests combine in a country devastated by a pandemic.

The result is a series about the Luciano family and their dangerous journey toward the Haven, a prepared survival compound. Every book narrows in on a different family member or ally, pairing external disaster with a central relationship. The world is collapsing, but the stories keep asking smaller, more painful questions. Who can be trusted? Who gets protected? What does a promise mean when keeping it could cost a life?

That shared focus is what makes the connection useful. Neal readers who enjoy emotional suspense can move from Hawaii crime stories into Scorch. Kimelman readers who like Sydney Rye's high-stakes momentum can see how that pace works in a romance-driven survival setting. The pseudonyms can make the bibliography look more complicated than it is, but the books themselves have a clear entry point.

Start with Scorch Road.

From there, read Cinder Road, Smoke Road, Burnt Road, Flame Road, and Smolder Road in order. The series works as a connected family saga, and later books carry forward the effects of the first outbreak, earlier losses, and the ongoing struggle to reach safety. It is a useful bridge between two writers whose usual settings differ, but whose characters both know that survival is never only physical.