Melissa Adelman Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Melissa Adelman
Melissa Adelman was born and brought up in the Washington, DC suburbs, a first generation American with parents from Chile and Haiti.

When she is not busy traveling the world for her job as an international development economist, her favorite place to be is at home, this old house filled with surprises located just outside of DC.

Melissa has her PhD and BA in economics from Harvard University and has also written numerous research volumes and policy papers.

All of Melissa’s favorite books are epic family sagas, everything like “Middlesex”, “The Poisonwood Bible”, “The House of Spirits”, and “Pachinko”. There is just something about family drama that she cannot get enough of, possibly since she grew up in this family where crazy drama got hastily swept under this incredibly lumpy rug, so she needs to work through it vicariously. We all love family drama, both big and small, since we’ve all got it. It is just a common aspect of the human experience.

Melissa’s writing is inspired by TV shows like “Beef”, which features an original and smart portrayal of race, class, sex, family dysfunction, and a dozen other aspects of modern adult life. It has inspired her to lean more into her weird ideas.

“What the Neighbors Saw” is about the gap between how we present ourselves and what is actually going on. Alexis has always been living as an outsider, a scholarship student at elite schools, a college kid without anywhere to go during the holidays, a young professional attempting to navigate the world without anybody giving advice or support. However she has kept going, attempting to succeed and live a better life.

So moving to the suburbs is supposed to be her fulfilling these efforts, however once she gets there, she is deeply uncomfortable since she still feels out of place in a primarily wealthy and white community.

This outsider perspective winds up being pretty valuable, however, since it makes her keep a wary eye trained on her new neighbors and notice the shadows underneath the perfect surface.

Living in the suburbs for a number of years, Melissa finds that the location is full of tensions that serve a domestic suspense plot quite well. The trappings of a stable family life (owning a home, dogs, routines) juxtaposed against some dark family secrets. The facade of community cracking under the stress to reveal neighbors’ biases and suspicions, Melissa loves all of that stuff.

A lot of the house headaches in the novel are based on real life. She lives in a country where people joke all the time about renovation being the official local pastime, since a lot of the housing stock is way over 50 years old. When she and her husband first bought her house, she re-watched “The Money Pit” with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, in this futile attempt to understand the questionable choices they were making.

This is where the initial spark for the novel came from, watching the film and thinking she’s love a story with all of these outrageous home reno issues plus murder plus neighbor drama. Could she possibly write such a book?

She will jump to correct her husband with “domestic suspense” any and every single time he tells somebody that she wrote a mystery novel. Suspense is something that is about the tension, all of the things that aren’t quite right. And following all of the threads which make up such a tight knot of tension through the course of a novel.

She had the pulsing vein of the main plot line right from the start, and the work for her was to flesh it out in order to it justice. Like how to foreshadow things without giving any of it away, how to weave in sub plots which are relevant and interesting enough to carry the story along, how to make everything play out plausibly. She’s a very heavy self-editor, in the sense that just a small percentage of the words running through her head will actually make it onto her laptop screen. So for her the process of writing is like sand art. As in, one layer at a time, where she writes the core of the story until the end, then go back and add again and again, until it’s all finished.

“What the Neighbors Saw” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. Sometimes the darkest of acts happen in the most beautiful houses.

Alexis and Sam buy this neglected Cape Cod house in this exclusive DC suburb, they are both ecstatic. Sam is right on the verge of making partner at his law firm, while Alexis is pregnant with their second kid, and their glamorous neighbors welcome the couple with open arms. Things are starting to look up and Alexis believes that she can finally leave her troubled past behind her.

However the neighborhood’s picture perfect image gets shattered once Teddy, their neighbor, a handsome and successful dad of three, is discovered dead on the steep banks of the Potomac River. The community is obviously shaken, and while the cops struggle to apprehend and identify this killer, tension in the neighborhood mounts and some long buried secrets begin emerging.

Alexis, in the midst of all this turmoil, takes comfort in her budding friendship with Blair, Teddy’s charismatic and beautiful widow. However while the women grow ever closer, this neighborhood just gets more divided. And once the unthinkable truth behind Teddy’s murder finally gets uncovered, both Alexis and Blair have to reexamine their friendship and decide just how far they’re willing to go to preserve the lives they’ve so carefully constructed.

“The Couple Next Door” meets “Desperate Housewives” in a chilling tale of murder and intrigue set in a well-to-do DC suburb.

This is a riveting debut novel, Melissa marries layered and rich characters with some page turning tension in a novel that is almost impossible not to finish in a single sitting while being remarkably suspenseful throughout.

Melissa delivers a refreshing read, where it’s quite a slow burn of a neighborhood suspense type story that is never over the top.