Kristen Bird Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Kristen Bird is an award-winning author of mystery fiction from Houston that is best known for her debut novel “The Night She Went Missing.”

The author has lived on both coasts of the United States but she has roots in the South where she lived for many years in Galveston, Alabama. Growing up, she lived in several states in the US including Texas, Virginia, Oregon, Alabama, and California.
She has over the years been writing short stories and plays for anyone that would read them. She would ultimately head to college where she graduated with a double major in Journalism and Music. A few years later, she went back to college and got her master’s degree in Literature.

It was while she was doing her master’s that she penned her first full-length novel as her creative thesis. After graduation, she became a teacher of English in high school, even as she wrote in local coffee shops in the city of Houston.
As a teacher, Kristen Bird is known to come up with creative pairings of modern tests and classic cannon which she asks her classes to read.

When she is not writing her novels, she loves to visit the parks with her family and when time permits she watches quirky movies with her husband. Her husband is the worship director and musician at their church and together with her daughters often encourages her in her writing.

Bird got her early start in writing when she was in the third grade and won a publishing contest alongside several of her classmates. The small book they produced was published by a local printing press in her small Galveston hometown and this provided her first taste of publishing.

As she got older, she started thinking that writing was maybe not a very practical career choice. When she went to college she got a double major in mass media and music.

Kristen Bird believed she would be better off doing something with writing in a journalistic or corporate setting. After graduation, she spent three years in marketing until she moved to Galveston.

She decided to apply to become a substitute teacher as she went back to college to get her literature master’s degree.. Bird was pleasantly surprised when she was offered a teaching job when the college unexpectedly lost its permanent teacher.
She would become a teacher and has been doing it for decades now. While she became a professional teacher, she continued dabbling in writing over the years.

For her thesis master’s she penned a 50,000-word manuscript that was a contemporary romance that harked back to the time period in which Jane Austen lived. But it was her second novel that made her realize that she needed to be a traditionally published author.

Kristen Bird’s first attempt at penning a novel was straight after she finished her undergraduate studies. However, she had no understanding of the writing and publishing process and never finished it. She was in her mid-twenties when she penned her first full-length manuscript as part of her creative writing thesis.

Following the birth of her twins, she continued writing in brief spurts over several years. She penned “The Night She Went Missing” over nine months after she got inspiration from a very unlikely source.

Kristen was then teaching a journalism class and along with her students, she read a beautiful and harrowing piece in “The New Yorker.” It was a piece written by Rachel Aviv titled “How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity.”

After reading about the experiences of the lead, who has to deal with dissociative fugue states her mind began going through several what-if questions. She would then come up with the story of a girl that went missing only to be found washed up on the harbor in Galveston two months later.

She seems to have no inkling of how she got there or where she had been all that time. It was this manuscript that would catch her agent’s eye. They edited together for nearly half a year before submitting it in April 2020 just before the COVID lockdowns began. The novel was ultimately published in 2020 and became her breakout work.

Kristen Bird’s novel “The Night She Went Missing” is a brilliant debut work full of domestic drama and suspense. It tells the stories of three families who are connected by the many happenings in a small town where just about everyone is known to everyone else.
Rasalyn Callahan who is the town’s matriarch is the master puppeteer that can get almost anyone to do her bidding. Leslie, Morgan, and Catherine were once friends but their relationship has gone downhill and they are hardly speaking except when it is absolutely necessary.
Things get very interesting when Catherine’s teenage daughter goes missing one night following a party. Catherine goes all in trying to find Emily and even seeks the help of Leslie’s daughter Anna and Morgan’s son Alex.

There has been a lot of tension between the two families particularly with regard to what happened to the missing Emily. The author is excellent at building tension with a well-done conclusion and a quick-paced plot.

Coming with people with a lot of psychological and very real-life problems, and tons of family drama combined with an intricate plot, it makes for an impressive debut.

“I Love It When You Lie” by Kristen Bird tells the stories of the Williams women that are known for burying secrets.

Days before she turns eighty, Pearl Williams has the audacity to go die at the most unexpected moment. It is now up to her granddaughters to plan for her interment even as their lives begin unraveling with each passing day.

Tara Williams is the wife of a pastor that has been making a series of decisions that could destroy her husband’s church. June Williams is desperate to get a baby even though her husband is not interested.

The youngest of the bunch is Clementine Williams who is in an affair with her professor and keeps on ignoring what he really is. Lastly, there is the sister-in-law Stephanie an outsider who is privy to the Williams family secrets.

But over the weekend, Gran Pearl is not the only one they will be putting into the grave as someone has disappeared in the dark Appalachian woods. Gran may not have taught them anything but she sure taught them how to get rid of a worthless man.