I was born in New York City, raised five minutes from the Bronx, and began my career in my late 20s when, after having little luck procuring an agent or a publisher, I took a big risk, quit my teaching job, and moved to England. Two weeks later I signed with an agent for my books and another for my scripts, and lived with my wife and—four years later—daughter for over five years in London, Lyme Regis, Cambridge, and then back to London before my first novel (the 13th I’d written), The Man from Marseille, was published in Britain by John Murray. A year later it was published in the US by St. Martin’s Press.

My first five novels were categorized as literary fiction, though I’d always included some genre—mystery, thriller, suspense—in the mix. I’d been much influenced by certain contemporary French writers I’d been reading since the late ‘70s: Patrick Modiano, René Belletto and others, all of whom were mixing genres. My sixth novel, Airtight, was a semi-autobiographical caper story.

Then came The Drowning, also based on my own experience, this time when I was eight years old in summer camp and abandoned on a raft in the middle of a lake by a swimming counselor, even though I couldn’t swim. The fiction begins when the eight-year-old disappears, only to reappear, it seems, twenty-one years later to exact his revenge on the man who’d left him on the raft. That book became my first straight psychological thriller, followed by two more, If She Were Dead and, most recently, The Summoning, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award in 2022.

The Drowning and The Summoning are also published in France by Editions Gallimard under their Série Noire imprint.

The Drowning is currently in development as a limited series or feature film in France.

My fourth novel, The Discovery of Light, was a Barnes & Noble Discover title.

As a screenwriter I was an Academy Nicholl Fellowship semifinalist in 2014. 

I currently live five minutes from the Atlantic Ocean on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

And I’m a member of PEN America and the Authors Guild.