Shari Lapena

Before she wrote a single word of fiction, Shari Lapena had already lived two professional lives. Born in Canada in 1960, she trained as a lawyer and later worked as an English teacher — careers that, between them, sharpened her eye for human fallibility and the gap between what people say and what they actually mean. Both qualities turned out to be rather useful when she eventually moved into crime writing.

Her first two novels occupied quite different territory. Things Go Flying (2008) was a darkly comic literary debut with a fantastical edge, earning a shortlisting for the Sunburst Award in 2009. Happiness Economics followed in 2011 and landed a nomination for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Her work had also previously been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, and in 2004 she won the Great Toronto Literary Project. The literary community had noticed her. The wider reading public was still to come.

Everything changed with The Couple Next Door in 2016. A psychological thriller built around a missing baby and the couple who left her next door at a dinner party, the novel became a phenomenon — selling over 4 million copies worldwide, topping bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and winning the Nielsen Awards Gold Bestseller in 2018. WHSmith named it Book of the Year in 2016. It announced a new voice in domestic suspense: tightly plotted, propulsive, and deeply interested in how quickly a seemingly ordinary life can collapse inward.

What followed was a run of standalone thrillers that confirmed the first book wasn't a fluke. A Stranger in the House (2017) played with memory and identity inside a suburban marriage. An Unwanted Guest (2018) leaned into the closed-environment tradition, trapping a group of strangers in a remote mountain inn as the bodies began to mount. Someone We Know (2019) examined the quiet paranoia of neighbourhood life when an anonymous note starts to circulate. The End of Her (2020) brought an unsettling stranger from the past back into a couple's present. Not a Happy Family (2021), another Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, earned a Richard and Judy Book Club selection alongside The Couple Next Door — a distinction that speaks to her consistent crossover appeal between genre readers and the mainstream.

Every one of Lapena's thrillers is a standalone, which means readers can enter at any point without commitment to a series arc. The through-line is something more atmospheric than plot: she consistently places ordinary, middle-class characters under extraordinary pressure and watches how guilt, suspicion, and self-interest reshape them. Her narration moves between multiple perspectives with ease, a technique that keeps the reader perpetually off-balance, never entirely certain who to believe.

Everyone Here Is Lying (2023) and What Have You Done? (2024) continued her pace of roughly one book per year, and She Didn't See It Coming followed in 2025 to strong critical response. Her tenth thriller, Getting Away with Murder, is due for publication in July 2026. The Couple Next Door has also been optioned for a television adaptation, with a Paramount+ limited series in development as of 2026.

Lapena writes full-time from a farm in Ontario, where she lives with her husband. Her books have been sold in forty territories and translated into dozens of languages. She does not outline — by her own account, she begins with a premise and follows her characters from there, a process that perhaps explains the genuinely unexpected turns her novels tend to take.