Rachel Koller Croft Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Rachel Koller Croft
Rachel Koller Croft is a screenwriter and author in Los Angeles where she’s scripted projects for Comedy Central, Blumhouse, and Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as others.

She lives with Charles (her husband) and Juniper (their rescue pitbull) by the beach.

Rachel loves villains, both on screen and in books. Sometimes they’re the main character, however it is rarer than it should be, so the biting voice of Bea came first to Rachel. She leaned on some of her snarkier impulses, along with inspiration from her best girlfriends, and grew this character from there, and made her just as bold and big as she could without making Bea a caricature.

Despite and because of her flaws, Rachel does believe Bea is enormously relatable, something that she thinks makes her intriguing to readers along with her undeniable sense of humor. And then she went and dumped Bea into this world that both repels and fascinates Rachel: which is the world of the one percent, and thought about how exactly a gorgeous young woman could get ahead in such a world like this, motivated by a less than ideal background and accompanied by intelligence and an aptitude for manipulation.

This story was a blast for Rachel to plot out, but first and foremost was making sure that everything related back to Bea and how she’d move throughout this world she was creating. Bea was always Rachel’s top priority.

When she started writing the book, her first draft was not all that pressing for her. She was working on paid projects in both film and television, so she’d just work on the novel at times. However she was able to get a draft completed in just under a year. It was a pretty different version of what “Stone Cold Fox” ultimately became. Bea was always the constant, though.

Rachel really dug in once she found her truly amazing agent and basically did a page-one rewrite with her astute notes giving her guidance, strengthening the characterization of everybody, with a new focus on Bea’s relationship with her mom, and upping the cat-and-mouse game Bea and Gale have, of course. This rewrite process took her another year. They sold it at auction shortly after that, and it was about 18 months before the book was published so in total, the entire process took about 3 and a half years.

Coming from the entertainment industry, where it can take such a long time to get answers, if any are given at all, she found the publishing process super quick when it came to overall decisiveness.

Rachel is always being surprised when she writes, but also after the fact. She is certain that other writers feel this way as well, but sometimes it is like she’s being touched by something, and she’s able to just go, go, go full steam ahead, without really laboring through what she’s writing. And when she reads it back later, she’s delighted that it is pretty good even though she does not remember creating the exact scene or sentence which just struck her. The opposite sometimes happens, too, however that’s just part of the process.

She is a pretty broad outliner to allow for surprises since it is her favorite part of her process. Some new character will arise from out of nowhere (like Wren Daly) or she’d think about the obvious choice that Bea would make next, however then she’d think about the craziest choice that she could make instead and how to make that work with her character in order to keep the reader on their toes without losing their trust in what she’s established already.

These scenes just about never come to her while she’s in the outline phase, it is always while she’s clacking away on her computer and a force comes through in the moment. It is very incredible how this can happen.

Rachel feels, in everything that she creates, like that of a stellar party host. She wants to make sure that her readers are entertained the moment they open up her book, and that they meet a few interesting characters during the time they spend with her novel, that they laugh a bunch, and that they feel some emotional response or maybe think about something in such a way that they haven’t before. Above all else, she wants her readers to associate her novels with a good time.

“Stone Cold Fox” is the first of many novels that Rachel writes, and she wants her readers to trust that they’ll always have a fun time reading a Rachel Koller Croft novel. This is her north star.

“Stone Cold Fox” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. Perfectly wicked debut thriller novel about this ambitious woman that, after spending a lifetime of conning right alongside her mom, just wants to leave her dark past behind her and marry the heir to one of the wealthiest families in the country.

Bea, like any enterprising woman, knows her worth and is determined to get everything that she deserves, it just so happens that what she truly deserves is to marry rich. Filthy rich. After years of all the forced instruction by her mom in the art of swindling guys, a Bea that’s now solo just wants nothing more than to just close and lock the door on their sordid partnership so that she can vanish safely into old money domesticity, and seal the last phase of her escape.

Bea selects her ultimate target in the fully loaded, and thoroughly blue blooded and dull Collin Case, she is prepared to deploy each one of her tricks one final time. This challenge is not getting the ring, however also the approval of Collin’s family as well as everybody else in their 1 percent tax bracket, especially Gale Wallace-Leicester, his childhood best friend.

Going up against Gale is not a threat to such an expert as Bea, however what starts as an amusing cat-and-mouse game soon develops into a dangerous pursuit of the grisly truth. Finding she’s in a literal life-and-death crossroads as everything’s on the line, she must truly decide who it is she wants to be. Like mom, like daughter?