She was educated at The Queen's University of Belfast, where she received a BA (Hons), MA, and PhD by the age of 25.
[2] Prominent themes in Jess-Cooke's work include trauma, motherhood, and feminism.
She is the author of bestselling gothic novels, The Nesting (2020), which was published in 2021 in the UK and Commonwealth by HarperCollins, The Lighthouse Witches, which was nominated for ITW Thriller Awards and an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America, and optioned for a TV series by StudioCanal, and The Ghost Woods (2022), which was an Indigo Book of the Year 2022.
Jess-Cooke regularly visits the place where she sets her books to carry out fieldwork and interviews.
In 2020, Jess-Cooke set up a virtual literary festival, The Stay-at-Home Literary Festival, which featured hundreds of writers, attracted audiences of over 15,000 and ran for two weeks throughout the pandemic.