Megan Collins Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Megan Collins is a bestselling mystery and psychological suspense fiction author from Connecticut.

She went to Wheaton College where she got her degree in Creative writing and English. The author is also the holder of a Creative Writer master’s degree from Boston University.

Megan has been a teacher of creative writing for more than a dozen years. Over the years, she taught at the Central Connecticut State University and the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts.

Megan guided students to pen works that would go on to win many prestigious national, state, and regional writing competitions. Many of the students she taught have gone on to publish novels.

In addition to teaching and writing, she is the managing editor of a prompt-based literary magazine known as “3Elements Review.” Working for the magazine she is charged with providing line edit and developmental feedback to clients.

Collins published “The Winter Sister” her debut novel in 2019 and has since then not stopped. She now has several more works in her portfolio.

When she is not writing her novels, she can usually be found indulging her sweet tooth, teaching, reading, or writing. She also loves to spend much of her time with her husband and Maisy their golden retriever.

Writing is something that Megan Collins always desired to do ever since she was six years old.

Among the first people in her family to give her encouragement were her grandparents. They offered her a bunch of blank pieces of paper stapled together, which served as her journal that she soon filled with stories.

Her first-ever story was titled “Bad Cats” and she had a sense of exhilaration when she finished writing it. It felt good getting something from nothing and making that empty space into a beautiful story to share with others.
It was a magical feeling and she would be spellbound about writing stories for the rest of her life.

Aside from the influence of her grandparents, she has also been influenced by the books that she read. The most influential literary work has to be Sylvia Plath’s “The Collected Poems.”

The author has also said that prior to reading Plath’s works when she was in her teenage years, she used to pen poetry full of cliches and a lot of abstract elements.

Once she started reading Sylvia Plath, and saw how beautifully she made experiences and emotions feel very new and real she changed forever.

Given that she never studied creative writing until she went to college, Plath would become her most influential teacher during this time.

As for inspiration, Megan Collins got the ideas for her blockbuster novel “The Winter Sister” from the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone.

For the longest time, this was her favorite myth as she loved that it could be read first as a story about motherhood. It is also a showcase of the aftereffects of traumatic events and what happens when people will just not let go of grief.
She had the inspiration for the novel when she started thinking about what would have transpired had Demeter decided to have another daughter.

It would have been interesting if Persephone had a sibling that had to work through childhood while dealing with a mother’s rage, neglect, and unending grief, given the disappearance of her sister.
It was from this that she came up with the character of Sylvie, the lead of the novel. From conception to publication it took about two years until the work was published in 2019.

“The Winter Sister’” by Megan Collins tells the story of Sylvie who remembers the events that happened to her family almost sixteen years ago.

Her sister Persephone failed to come home as she was spending time with the boyfriend her parents had forbidden her from seeing. It was three years before someone discovered her body but the culprit was never found.

Fast forward to the present and Sylvie comes home to take care of Annie, her estranged mother who is suffering from cancer. Even before she lost her firstborn daughter, she used to have dark days.

Weeks after the death of Persephone, her close bond with Sylvie was shattered which makes their present reunion very uncomfortable.

Even worse, Ben, who was Persephone’s former boyfriend, is working at the cancer center where her mother is being treated. Sylvie believed Ben was culpable for her sister’s death but also feels guilty somehow.

Navigating a very complicated relationship with Annie, she slowly but steadily begins unearthing some dark secrets about her family and the night Persephone died.

Megan Collins’s “The Family Plot” tells the story of Dahlia Lighthouse, a twenty-six-year-old who needs to take time to learn about the real world.

She had been brought up in an isolated mansion in the woods where her crime-obsessed patent had kept her isolated from the world.

She had thus spent years alone and unable to move on from the past, particularly following the disappearance of her brother then aged sixteen.

Following the death of her father, Dahlia comes back to the house she had kept a wide berth from for years.

But as the rest of her family comes back home for the memorial, there is a gruesome discovery. In the reserve plot is the body of Andy and it does seem that his skull had been bashed in with an ax.

Everybody has a different reaction to the discovery. Charlie works hard as he strives to build a huge family memorial museum, while Tate, his sister, paints dioramas on crime scenes, even as their mother unexpectedly shows a cheerful domestic facade.
As Dahlia is grappling with her own horror and grief, she comes to the realization that the family mansion and her eccentric family are key to resolving the mystery of her sibling’s death.

“Behind the Red Door” by Megan Collins is a completely riveting and atmospheric work. It is the story of a woman who believes that she is somehow connected to a decades-old kidnapping case.

In the present, the victim has once again disappeared and hence there is a frantic quest to understand the happenings from the previous incident.

At the opening of the novel, Fern Douglas hears about the disappearance of thirty-four-year-old Astrid Sullivan and is convinced that she knows her.

Her husband believes she is just reliving the woman’s famous kidnapping and safe return about two decades ago. But Fern does not remember any of that even though it happened just a few miles outside her hometown in Hampshire.
Soon after, Astrid becomes a common feature in Fern’s nightmare in which some strange girl pleads with her to save her.

When she goes back home to New Hampshire, Fern gets a copy of the missing woman’s memoir and finds more evidence that she may have a connection with Astrid.

She can only hope that she gets her memory back so that she can help the missing woman before it is too late.