Mary-Jane Riley
Mary-Jane Riley spent many years as a BBC journalist, presenting magazine programmes on BBC Radio in the Eastern Counties. She has interviewed people from all walks of life – from politicians to authors to actors to local people in villages and towns. It was when the author Ruth Rendell told her to “just write” that she began writing fiction seriously.
Mary-Jane has had stories published in women’s magazines and has contributed to podcasts for the Royal Literary Fund in her role as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Cambridge University.
She has taught Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, and has delivered writing workshops to young offenders, people with disabilities and charities – including aid workers in Africa.
Mary-Jane is married to a retired BBC TV Reporter and has three grown up children and a Golden Retriever. She lives in the Waveney Valley in rural Suffolk.
She is the author of two thriller series. Her latest, the historical Beattie Cavendish series is set in post-Second World War Europe featuring Beattie Cavendish, a covert operative for GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). The protagonist of the four earlier contemporary thrillers is journalist Alex Devlin and the stories are set in East Anglia.
For more information please visit her website maryjaneriley.com and she is on Instagram as maryjanerileyauthor.
Latest book: BEATTIE CAVENDISH AND THE HIGHLAND HIDEAWAY
Winter 1949 and the Cold War between East and West is intensifying. Rumours abound the Russians are making advances in creating an atomic bomb. Spies are everywhere. No one can be trusted.
Beattie Cavendish, special operative for a covert section of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) is sent to a pivotal listening station in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands.
She finds a base in chaos – its commander missing, its mission compromised, and there are whispers of a German spy ring closing in.
But Beattie’s task takes a dark and personal turn when her uncle vanishes from nearby leaving behind a chilling note: ‘I know who you really are’.
Beattie needs help, so turns to the one person she trusts implicitly– private detective Patrick Corrigan. Together they learn her uncle has been visiting a Highland lodge used to hide out-of-favour Allied spies during the war.
As the snow begins to fall hard and fast and her past and present collide, Beattie realises the answers she is looking for lie buried in her wartime past and the search for the truth will not necessarily bring her peace.
Published by Allison and Busby: HB and eBook February 2026, Paperback September 2026
BEATTIE CAVENDISH AND THE WHITE PEARL CLUB
It's 1948 and the clouds of war still hang over the everyday lives of British people.
Graduate Beattie Cavendish, 25, has no intention of reverting to the expected roles of wife, mother and hostess that might have seemed natural after the war, so when she is offered an undercover role within a covert branch of the newly formed GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), she jumps at it.
Her first assignment appears straightforward: befriend the son of Conservative MP Ralph Bowen and report any unusual activity or conversations there may be.
But when Beattie finds the Bowens' housekeeper Sofia Huber murdered, the stakes are raised.
With the help of Irish war veteran turned private detective Patrick Corrigan, Beattie works to uncover Sofia’s killer.
Soon Beattie and Corrigan are caught up in a deadly game of cat and mouse in the world of secrecy and spies. There is no one to trust, and as Beattie comes closer to uncovering the truth, her life and the lives of those whom she holds dear come under threat. She will need all her skills to stay alive.
Published by Allison and Busby HB eBook August 2025, Paperback February 2026
THE ALEX DEVLIN SERIES
GONE IN THE NIGHT
It’s a new year and a new start for Alex. Her wayward sister is settled and happy, as is her almost adult son, Gus. She has a new flat overlooking the tide mill and river in a busy Suffolk market town, and her professional life is going from strength to strength.
One cold, foggy night she comes across a crashed car and an injured man on a lonely road. Help arrives to take him to hospital. But next morning, when Alex tries to find out how he is, she draws a blank. The man has disappeared into thin air. When Alex searches for him, she discovers he is not the first person to have gone missing in mysterious circumstances.
Alex smells a story. Could the missing man have come from the island across the water that local people think is haunted? What truth is there in stories of screams being heard over the air in the dead of night? And have bodies really been washed up on the shingle of a nearby beach? As Alex delves deeper into the mystery, she feels her every move is being watched. As the sea mists steal over the land and the temperature drops, Alex finds she is fighting for her life as she searches for the truth.
Published by One More Chapter May 2019
DARK WATERS
The third in the series, begins with a macabre discovery on board a boat on the tranquil Norfolk Broads – the decomposing bodies of two elderly men. It appears they did not know each other and police suspect an internet suicide pact. Alex’s search for the truth reveals a darker story. She finds a connection between the two men and other unexplained deaths.
She investigates further. The stakes rise and her own family becomes embroiled in the mystery. Her inquiries lead her to the University of Cambridge. Could the roots of the puzzle lie there with a tragedy that unfolded amongst a group of carefree students many years before?
As past and present collide, long-buried secrets come to the surface and Alex’s life and the lives of her family are on the line.
Published by One More Chapter March 2018
AFTER SHE FELL
It took fifteen years for journalist Alex Devlin to find out the truth about what really happened when her four-year-old niece and nephew were abducted. Now her old friend Catriona Devonshire needs help.
Catriona's seventeen-year-old daughter Elena was found dead at the bottom of a cliff near her exclusive boarding school in North Norfolk. The death has been ruled a suicide, but Catriona is not convinced.
When Alex arrives at Hallow’s Edge to investigate, she quickly finds that life at the boarding school was not as idyllic as the bucolic setting might suggest, and uncovers a culture of drug-taking, bullying and tension between the school and village.
Set against the crumbling cliffs of the North Norfolk coast, no one is quite who they seem to be, and several people might have had reason to want Elena to fall.
Harper Collins/Killer Reads 2016,
Goldmann Verlag, Germany 2018
THE BAD THINGS
If you had the chance to talk face-to-face with the one who tore your family apart, would you take it?
Alex Devlin’s life changed forever when her sister’s two small children were snatched from the garden. A local man was convicted of murder, his mistress, Jackie Wood, jailed as an accessory. Fifteen years on and the Court of Appeal quashes Wood’s conviction. Alex, now a successful journalist, sets out to find the truth of Wood’s involvement.
Years before, police officer Kate Todd found one of the children’s bodies. She, too, has her own reasons to delve back into the original murder investigation.
Soon the horrifying secrets of the day the children went missing test both women to the limit and make them question all the people they trust.
Set against the bleak winter landscape of the Suffolk coast, THE BAD THINGS asks if we ever really know what is in the hearts of those closest to us.
HarperCollins/Killer Reads August 2015
Goldmann Verlag September 2016
