Ren Richards Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Ren Richards
Ren Richards is the pseudonym for USA Today and New York Times Bestselling author Lauren DeStefano. She’s published multiple Young Adult Novels and four middle-grade novels but she has always dreamed about breaking into the adult suspense category.

Ren’s always loved psychological thrillers. She was reading “Silence of the Lambs”, “Kiss the Girls”, and any novel by Stephen King she could get her hands on during long family road trips during her high school days.

The one book that has shaped her the most as a writer as well as a human being is most likely “Harold and the Purple Crayon”.

There are a ton of different kinds of stories she would like to write, and it just turned out that young adult was the first in line, however she’s trying to make some more room for even more genres.

To unwind after a long day, she watches true crime shows, constantly watching Investigation Discovery and is up for watching anything they put out.

Ren was born October 13, 1984 in New Haven Connecticut. She has a BA in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing from Albertus Magnus College.

When she was very young, she was absolutely obsessed with the American Girl books and her parents even took her to Colonial Williamsburg for summer vacation. She began falling in love with adult fiction somewhere around middle school because it was a lot more dramatic than books in her age group, most notably was “The Other Side of Midnight” by Sidney Sheldon. She entered into the world of tragic and dark and hasn’t looked back.

Ren constantly sees on social media her friends posting about birth announcements and happy family photos. Then she sees on the news and sees that somebody’s just committed a terrible crime. This criminal began as a baby too. This is something that she has always wondered about. She wondered what it might be like for a parent to have a child, give them all the love in the world, and somehow know that their child is not at all like the others. What must it be like to have this nettling fear that one day this baby may grow up and do something horrible?

This was Nell’s reality. She was always grappling with her desire to love her daughter, yet was still terrified of her. Nell felt a lot of guilt knowing that her life would’ve been a much more peaceful place if she simply gave her kid away, however she still had that kind of hope that her love would be enough. It never was, though.

Her novel is the tale behind the scenes of what people actually see on the news. Quite a few cases end up unsolved. There’s never a time machine to show us the moment a child vanished, so that we are able to see what actually happened and just who is to blame. What we believe occurred, however strongly, is all just conjecture. In a lot of cases, there’s not even a confession when criminals are found guilty. This is that time machine, showing you everything and telling everybody’s story.

She is always haunted by true crime, like “Because You Loved Me” by M. William Phelps, or “The Darkest Night” by Ron Franscell. There is a fine balance between telling their story yet also attempting to honor the real people affected by what has happened. That’s something she respects about true crime authors, and a quality that she wanted to give to Nell. She only wants to enter this scene and offer up something that readers of all her favorite books would enjoy too.

“The Broken Ones” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2020. She did not know if she actually loved her baby. But did she in fact kill her?

Nell Way, a bestselling true crime writer, tells the stories of other people, and has established a reputation for herself for humanizing horrible murders. She has a rare compassion for those cases she profiles. “Murderers are human too” is Nell’s catchphrase. However there is one story that she refuses to tell. Ten years prior, she was a teen mom with a four year old that she found incredibly difficult to love. Then that little girl vanished.

She was the most infamous woman in all of America, and the prime suspect. However the prosecution’s case was not strong enough and wound up being acquitted of all the charges. She was free to change her name and begin again in another place. Even while the internet commenters demand her head.

Then ten years go by. She is now a successful adult that lives in a penthouse with an adoring boyfriend as the novel opens. Nell’s putting the final touches on her book and has a big royalty check on hand. Things are going pretty good for her. While Nell starts interviewing the subject of her third book, named Easter Hamblin, who is a woman that was convicted of murdering her twin sister (named Autumn), it starts becoming clear that somebody has revealed her true identity. They also know that Nell was not telling the full truth about the day her daughter disappeared. What did she really see when her child was taken?

Readers found this to be incredibly twisted, plotted masterfully, with some compelling characters, some severely dark moments, and an ending that leaves you awestruck. They also loved the mystery in it and were always unsure of who they should trust. Ren’s crafted a tale that is fraught with suspense, weaving back and forth through time and keeps you guessing the entire way through. Nell is an engaging and witty narrator, and makes for a fresh new voice in the overcrowded psychological suspense arena.

These complex and believable characters hook you into their secrets and play with your emotions in this dramatic and atmospheric thriller novel. Each and every one of these characters has their own dark side, including Nell and Lindsay, her sister. The novel is rather pared down, allowing the book to move along at a snappy pace.