Reckless Girls: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Rachel Hawkins is the best-selling author of both adult fiction and novels for young readers. She is especially known for The Wife Upstairs (2021), The Villa (2023), and The Heiress (2024). She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Auburn University and taught high school English before leaving education to write full-time. Hawkins has been an avid reader since childhood and penned her first mystery in kindergarten. She cites familial support for her writing at a young age as a key factor in her adult success and hopes to encourage young people to read through her middle grade and young adult titles. Hawkins is a fan of gothic literature, and many of her novels make use of gothic conventions, supernatural settings and characters, and paranormal events. In addition to the middle grade, young adult, and adult novels that she’s written under her own name, Hawkins also writes paranormal romances under the pseudonym Erin Sterling. 

Hawkins’s novels for adult readers share their fast-paced plotting, suspenseful stories, and in-depth female characterization with Reckless Girls.