Below is the complete list of Andrea Mara books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Deadly Ambition Books
About Andrea Mara
Andrea Mara is an Irish crime novelist known for psychological thrillers that turn ordinary family routines into sources of escalating fear. Her stories frequently begin with a recognizably everyday disruption—a child collected by the wrong person, a passenger disappearing from public transport, an unexplained figure inside a supposedly empty home—before exposing older secrets, compromised relationships, and crimes hidden beneath affluent suburban life. Rather than relying on professional detectives, Mara generally places parents, spouses, friends, and neighbours at the centre of the investigation, making emotional proximity to the danger one of her fiction’s defining strengths.
Before becoming a novelist, Mara spent seventeen years working in financial services, eventually becoming a fund manager. She began writing publicly through Office Mum, a parenting and lifestyle blog that examined the pressures of combining employment with raising children. After redundancy ended her financial-services career, she moved into freelance journalism and fiction, drawing on the domestic anxieties and social observations that had already become central to her nonfiction writing. She lives in Dublin with her husband and three children.
Her first novel, The Other Side of the Wall, was published in 2017. Its story of a new mother hearing disturbing sounds from the neighbouring house established Mara’s interest in the uncertainty produced by exhaustion, isolation, and the fear that other people will dismiss a woman’s account of danger. One Click and The Sleeper Lies continued her early exploration of domestic mistrust, online exposure, and the instability beneath apparently secure relationships.
Mara reached a much wider international readership with All Her Fault. The novel begins when Marissa Irvine arrives to collect her young son from a playdate, only to discover that the woman answering the door has never heard of him. The premise develops into a layered examination of motherhood, childcare, privilege, marital secrecy, and the speed with which suspicion can spread through a community. Its television adaptation, starring Sarah Snook, brought Mara’s work to an even larger audience in 2025.
Subsequent novels strengthened her reputation for building suspense from familiar situations. Hide and Seek uses a childhood game and a family’s new home to reopen an old disappearance. No One Saw a Thing begins when two children enter a London Underground train but only one remains aboard at the next station. Someone in the Attic turns footage of an intruder inside a home into a threat complicated by friendship, memory, and social media. These stories move through Dublin, London, and other contemporary settings, but their real territory is the private fear that someone trusted has concealed a decisive part of the truth.
It Should Have Been You won Irish Crime Novel of the Year in 2025, while Such a Nice Girl followed in 2026 with another disappearance rooted in friendship, family loyalty, and the uncertainty over whether a missing young woman is a victim or responsible for something darker. By that stage, Mara’s novels had sold more than one million copies across formats.
Mara’s books are principally standalones rather than a continuing series. Their connection lies in her recurring examination of ordinary people placed under extraordinary suspicion. Her strongest twists do more than identify a culprit: they reveal how ambition, resentment, fear, and misplaced protection can alter an entire family’s understanding of itself.