Below is the complete list of Liane Moriarty’s Deadly Ambition books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Deadly Ambition Books
About Deadly Ambition
Deadly Ambition is not a conventional Liane Moriarty series with recurring characters or a continuing storyline. It is a six-story, multi-author suspense collection united by a common theme: the destructive point at which aspiration becomes greed, control, fraud, or obsession. Moriarty contributes the opening story, The Price of Honey, while the remaining installments are written by Andrea Mara, A. R. Torre, Lauren Oliver, Lauren Ling Brown, and Tim Weaver. Each entry is a complete work by its credited author rather than part of Moriarty’s independent fictional world.
The Price of Honey takes place around the funeral of Barney Beckett, a celebrated technology billionaire whose public identity as an inspirational visionary conceals a controlling personality. His much younger widow, Honey, arrives expecting to occupy her designated position among the mourners but impulsively joins Barney’s three former wives instead. Rita, Svetlana, Meredith, and Honey have each experienced a different version of the same man, and their reunion brings old rivalries, unequal power, and unresolved betrayals into one carefully managed public occasion.
The setting allows Moriarty to work within territory familiar from her full-length novels while using a much tighter form. A social gathering becomes a stage on which manners, status, resentment, and private knowledge compete beneath apparently polite behavior. Barney is absent, yet his influence continues organizing the women around him. Even after death, his money, reputation, family arrangements, and final decisions determine where people sit, how they behave, and what they believe they are owed.
Honey initially appears to possess the advantages associated with being the last wife, but the funeral gradually exposes how little control she may actually hold. The older women are not merely discarded predecessors. Each understands something about Barney, his habits, or the structure of his relationships that Honey has not yet recognized. Their uneasy connection gives the story its emotional center, shifting attention away from competition for a powerful man and toward the shared experience of having been shaped by him.
The other Deadly Ambition stories explore the collection’s central idea through unrelated characters and settings. Marriage, artistic recognition, professional success, political influence, secrecy, and the desire for a life-changing opportunity become sources of suspense. The protagonists often believe they can manage one calculated deception or moral compromise, only to discover that ambition has placed them under someone else’s control. The unity is thematic rather than narrative: characters do not cross between stories, and events in one installment do not affect another.
All six entries were released on April 1, 2026, in short digital and audio formats designed to be completed in a single sitting. The Price of Honey is approximately thirty-four pages in its ebook edition and under an hour in audio, so it should not be approached as another full-length Moriarty novel. Its character development and reversals are deliberately compressed around the funeral encounter.
The numbered order provides a consistent route through the collection but is not required for plot comprehension. Readers interested specifically in Moriarty can read The Price of Honey independently without continuing through the other five stories. Those reading the entire collection will find a series of stylistically distinct thrillers connected by one recurring question: how much will a person sacrifice for wealth, recognition, influence, or control before the dream they pursued becomes the mechanism of their downfall?