Oct. 28, 2026
Contact: Cary Littlejohn, carylittlejohn@missouri.edu
Photo by Sam Cox
If you ever see a grave in the woods, keep walking.
Laura McHugh, MA ’99, BA ’00, remembers a neighbor sharing that warning shortly after she moved to the Missouri Ozarks as a child. Years later, those words would help launch the University of Missouri alumna’s career as a bestselling suspense novelist.
Today, McHugh writes about secrets buried in small towns, crimes that unsettle quiet communities and danger lurking just beyond the familiar. Her debut, “The Weight of Blood,” won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel, and her sixth book, “All But One,” is scheduled for release next year.
But here’s a plot twist even her fans might not see coming: Before she made a living writing thrillers, McHugh spent a decade writing computer code, drawing on skills she developed at Mizzou.
Finding fear in familiar places
Long before she became a bestselling author, McHugh had a taste for the macabre.
“I’ve been reading very dark stuff my entire life,” she said. “I feel very lucky that my mom let me read whatever I wanted. So, of course, I was reading Stephen King and Shirley Jackson.”
The Missouri Ozarks also shaped her imagination and would eventually become the setting for many of her novels.
McHugh remembers the region through small details such as finding morel mushrooms in the woods and seeing dead copperheads draped over barbed-wire fences as a warning of snake activity in the area.
“I always wanted to write about this place my whole life,” she said. “I wanted to show the world what a unique place this is.”
An unexpected career path
By college, McHugh knew she loved creative writing. But she wasn’t sure she could turn that passion into a career.
“I grew up in a working-class family,” she said. “I certainly didn’t know anyone who did something artistic for a living, and it made me nervous about how I would pay for it and whether I would be able to make a living afterwards.”
After earning an English degree from Truman State University, she began exploring other careers and found an opportunity at Mizzou, where she enrolled in a graduate program in library science.
While working as a graduate assistant in a campus computer lab, she discovered an entirely different interest.
“I met a computer programmer in the lab, and after talking about the job, I thought, ‘I’ve always loved computers; why don’t I try this?’” McHugh said.
Coding came naturally to her.
“It just made sense,” she said. “You’re just putting pieces together. It’s like writing a story in code.”
McHugh graduated from Mizzou with a master’s degree from the College of Education and Human Development, as well as a second bachelor’s degree in computer science once housed in the College of Arts and Science. The latter opened the door to the next decade of her life.
A new chapter
When the 2008 financial crisis cost McHugh a job in software development, she decided to pursue her lifelong ambition.
She was pregnant with her second child, and the timing was hardly ideal. But she began writing a novel, spending about a year on the first draft and several months revising it.
Writing a novel was only half the battle. Getting someone in the publishing industry to read it was another.
She approached the task like a computer programmer, studying the market and what literary agents wanted. Then she repeatedly revised her query letter — the pitch she hoped would convince someone to read her manuscript.
The breakthrough came when she emphasized something no amount of research could replicate: her firsthand knowledge of the Missouri Ozarks and an unsettling warning about graves in the woods.
“Once they realized I was an authentic voice from the area, not someone just hoping to set books in a particular setting, everything changed for me,” McHugh said.
The response was overwhelming. She landed a literary agent, and eight editors at major publishing houses expressed interest in her manuscript, which ultimately sold at auction.
Published in 2014, the novel follows a teenager investigating the disappearance of her mother and the murder of a friend in a small Ozarks town. Its success launched McHugh's career as a suspense novelist and established the haunting atmosphere that would become a hallmark of her fiction.
An education with unexpected returns
McHugh’s journey from aspiring writer to computer programmer to award-winning author wasn’t the path she envisioned for herself.
At Mizzou, library science offered a way to stay connected to books, while computer science gave her problem-solving skills she would later apply to both programming and novel writing.
That’s a lesson she hopes students, including her own children, will take from their education.
“An education doesn’t necessarily prepare you for one job,” she said. “It gives you knowledge and ways of thinking that may become valuable years later, in circumstances you can’t possibly anticipate.”
