Author

Catherine Ryan Howard

Catherine Ryan Howard
  • From award-winning and internationally bestselling crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard comes Burn after Reading, an addictive and twisty new thriller about a man who may have committed murder and the ghostwriter charged with helping him protest his innocence.

    A year ago, former professional cyclist Jack Smyth lost his wife in a fire at their home. But the nation’s sympathy turned to anger when it emerged that she had died before the fire started, in a violent attack. Although Jack has never been charged in connection to her death, a suffocating cloud of suspicion hangs over him and he’s become convinced that the only way out is to tell his side of the story.

    When Emily Joyce is offered the gig as his ghostwriter, her main motivation for saying yes is the payday. She flies out to the eerie, empty, master-planned town of Sanctuary, Florida, to hole up with Jack for a week, getting his story down. 

    But the story Jack tells isn’t the one she expected, and soon Emily is thrown into a dangerous plot twist that she may not be able to write her way out of …

  • From award-winning, internationally bestselling crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard comes The Trap: an unsettling mystery inspired by a series of still-unsolved disappearances in Ireland in the nineties, wherein one young woman risks everything to catch a faceless killer.

    One year ago, Lucy’s sister, Nicki, left to meet friends at a pub in Dublin and never came home. The third Irish woman to vanish inexplicably in as many years, the agony of not knowing what happened that night has turned Lucy’s life into a waking nightmare. So, she’s going to take matters into her own hands. 

    Angela works as a civilian paper-pusher in the Missing Persons Unit, but wants nothing more than to be a fully fledged member of An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. With the official investigation into the missing women stalled, she begins pulling on a thread that could break the case wide open—and destroy her chances of ever joining the force.

    A nameless man drives through the night, his latest victim in the back seat. He’s going to tell her everything, from the beginning. And soon, she’ll realize: what you don’t know can hurt you …

  • Lights 

    Feeling her stardom fading, struggling soap-actress Adele Rafferty is ready to give up on her dreams when she gets a last-minute offer to play the lead in upcoming horror film Final Draft. Could this be her big break? Will she have redemption for what happened the last time she was on a film set? Adele doesn’t think twice before signing the dotted line.  

    Camera 

    Adele quickly makes her way to set, deep into the isolated and wintry woods of West Cork, Ireland, miles away from civilization and cell service.  

    Action 

    When real life on set starts to somehow mirror the sinister events portrayed in the script, Adele fears the real horror lies off the page. Isolated and unsure who in the crew she can trust, is there anywhere or any time left to run?

  • Don’t miss The Trap, the latest dark and twisted thriller from internationally bestselling crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard—inspired by a series of still-unsolved disappearances.

    A New York Times Best Thriller of 2021

    A Washington Post Best Thriller of 2021

    A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year

    An Amazon Editors’ Pick

    "Bloody good." —The New York Times

    "Timely, surprising, emotionally alive, this is about as good as suspense fiction gets." —Washington Post

    No one even knew they were together. Now one of them is dead.

    56 DAYS AGO

    Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin and start dating the same week COVID-19 reaches Irish shores.

    35 DAYS AGO

    When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests they move in together. Ciara sees a unique opportunity for a relationship to flourish without the scrutiny of family and friends. Oliver sees a chance to hide who—and what—he really is.

    TODAY

    Detectives arrive at Oliver’s apartment to discover a decomposing body inside.

    Can they determine what really happened, or has lockdown created an opportunity for someone to commit the perfect crime?

    Look for these other pulse-pounding thrillers from award-winning, internationally bestselling crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard:

    • Distress Signals
    • The Liar’s Girl
    • Rewind
    • The Nothing Man
    • Run Time
    • The Trap
  • “Gripping, beautifully written, and genuinely chilling, The Nothing Man had me from page one. Simply stellar.”—Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award–winning author of The Dark Corners of the Night

    I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man. Now I am the woman who is going to catch him …

    At the age of twelve, Eve Black was the only member of her family to survive an encounter with serial attacker the Nothing Man. Now an adult, she is obsessed with identifying the man who destroyed her life.

    Supermarket security guard Jim Doyle has just started reading The Nothing Man—the true-crime memoir Eve has written about her efforts to track down her family’s killer. As he turns each page, his rage grows. Because Jim’s not just interested in reading about the Nothing Man. He is the Nothing Man.

    Jim soon begins to realize how dangerously close Eve is getting to the truth. He knows she won’t give up until she finds him. He has no choice but to stop her first …

  • PLAY

    Andrew, the manager of Shanamore Cottages, watches his only guest via a hidden camera in her room. One night the unthinkable happens: a shadowy figure emerges on-screen, kills her, and destroys the camera. But who is the murderer? How did they know about the camera? And how will Andrew live with himself?

    PAUSE

    Natalie wishes she’d stayed at home as soon as she arrives in the wintry isolation of Shanamore. There’s something creepy about the manager. She wants to leave, but she can’t—not until she’s found what she’s looking for …

    REWIND

    Psycho meets Fatal Attraction in this explosive story about a murder caught on camera. You’ve already missed the start. To get the full picture you must rewind the tape and play it through to the end, no matter how shocking …

  • “Readers of Paula Hawkins, Tana French, and Ruth Ware will love this exceptionally well-crafted thriller.”—Library Journal (starred review)

    “A very satisfying and twisty tale.”—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author

    Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel

    Her first love confessed to five murders … but the truth was so much worse.

    Will Hurley was an attractive, charming, and impressive student at Dublin’s elite St. John’s College—and Ireland’s most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his five young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just nineteen, Will is locked away in the city’s Central Psychiatric Hospital.

    Freshman Alison Smith moved to the Big Smoke to enroll in St. John’s and soon fell hard for Will Hurley. Her world bloomed … and then imploded when Liz, her best friend, became the latest victim of the Canal Killer—and the Canal Killer turned out to be the boy who’d been sleeping in her bed. Alison fled to the Netherlands and, in ten years, has never once looked back.

    When a young woman’s body is found in the Grand Canal, Garda detectives visit Will to see if he can assist them in solving what looks like a copycat killing. Instead, Will tells them he has something new to confess—but there’s only one person he’s prepared to confess it to.

    The last thing Alison wants is to be pulled back into the past she’s worked so hard to leave behind. Reluctantly, she returns to the city she hasn’t set foot in for more than a decade to face the man who murdered the woman she was supposed to become.

    Only to discover that, until now, Will has left out the worst part of all …

  • The acclaimed debut thriller from the internationally bestselling author of The Liar’s Girl and 56 Days

    The day Adam Dunne’s girlfriend, Sarah, fails to return from a Barcelona business trip, his perfect life begins to fall apart. Days later, the arrival of her passport and a note that reads “I’m sorry—S” sets off real alarm bells. He vows to do whatever it takes to find her.

    Adam is puzzled when he connects Sarah to a cruise ship called the Celebrate—and to a woman, Estelle, who disappeared from the same ship in eerily similar circumstances almost exactly a year before.

    To get answers, Adam must confront some difficult truths about his relationship with Sarah. He must do things of which he never thought himself capable. And he must try to outwit a predator who seems to have found the perfect hunting ground.