Santa Barbara Suspense Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| What She Gave Away | 2018 | Buy |
| What She Never Said | 2019 | Buy |
Catharine Riggs is a psychological suspense writer based on California’s central coast. She graduated from UCLA and earned an MBA from Drake University, then spent years in banking, teaching, and nonprofit work before turning to fiction. Her professional background in finance gave her a close look at the kind of greed and deception that would later fuel her novels. As she once put it, people assume banking is boring, but it can be full of intrigue, eccentric customers, and fraud.
Her debut novel, What She Gave Away, was published by Thomas & Mercer in 2018 and drew praise from authors like Robert Dugoni and T.R. Ragan. She followed it with What She Never Said in 2019, continuing her Santa Barbara Suspense series. The two books are loosely connected by their setting and recurring secondary characters rather than a single ongoing plot. Both explore the dark side of wealth and privilege in sunny Southern California, peeling back the polished surface of affluent communities to reveal secrets and bad choices underneath.