Dwyer Murphy Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Dwyer Murphy
Dwyer Murphy is a New York based editor and writer. He is the editor-in-chief of Literary Hub’s crime fiction vertical and the world’s most popular destination for thriller readers, Crime Reads.

He practiced law at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York City, where he was a litigator, and he served as the editor of the Columbia Law Review.

Dwyer was also an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction.

His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Common, Guernica, Electric Literature, The Paris Review Daily, as well as other publications.

Giving up the law always seemed to be the only decent thing to do with writing and crime fiction. It seemed a pretty genteel if inherently cruel profession and he always knew that he would quit doing it just as soon as he was able to, before it worked its way too deep under his skin.

He did get to meet quite a few interesting people during his time as a litigator. Odd clients with midnight crises, opponents, judges, and prosecutors. A bunch of gruff litigators schooled in the old New York lingo of power brokering and chits. It was not a bad way to spend your formative years at all, however at some point you do need to get the hell out. For him, books were this way out. He never had any intention of writing about lawyers or the odd mysteries they can sometimes get mixed up in, however when the time came that was the sort of story that he wanted to tell and to read about.

Working at CrimeReads has given him a deep appreciation for mystery fiction as a means of telling a passionate, vivid, provocative stories of human striving and misunderstanding. It is a form that has been passed down through the centuries, and has been built around the dark art of entertainment, suspense, and respect for your readers. The crime fiction world of the modern day is filled with new voices that tell timeless stories, and Dwyer wanted to be a part of it.

He wanted to write about the tail end of the analog era because there was such mystery to everyday life of that time, some of which got snuffed out by the full onset of the digital era. He’d sit around bars and living rooms debating questions which could be answered by a simple Google search. His pockets were lined with calling cards and he’d spend a good portion of each evening attempting to get ahold of people he knew to learn where they were going or what time a movie was playing.

“An Honest Living” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2022. Dwyer uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble this world of doom bitten characters and fallen dreams. His hard boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite. For anybody looking for a portrait of this New York, very few recent books have been able to conjure it so vividly.

An unwitting private investigator gets all caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents it.

After leaving behind the shackles and the comforts of this prestigious law firm, one restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up some odd jobs from this colorful assortment of clients. When Anna Reddick (a mysterious woman) shows up at his apartment with $10,000 in cash and asks him to track Newton (her missing antiquarian bookseller husband) down, whom she believes is also pilfering rare true crime volumes out of her collection, he trusts that it’ll be a quick and simple case.

However when the actual Anna Reddick, a magnetic yet unpredictable literary prodigy, shows up on his doorstep with just a few bones to pick with him, he finds himself being out of his depth, pulled into a series of deceptions that involve Joseph Conrad novels, aspiring flaneurs, unscrupulous booksellers, and seedy real estate developers.

Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and is immersed in the worlds of bookselling and literature, this novel is a gripping tale about obsession, artistic ambition, and the tiny crimes that we commit against each other every single day.

This novel has been infused with atmosphere and style that gives it so much dimension and electricity. Murphy’s own hardboiled rendering of this city is nothing short of exquisite. This is a landscape of reeking garbage, 24 hour dines and warehouse parties, of Midtown towers looking ghostly like a mountain range, salty rain that sweeps off the ocean. And of these tiny oddball delights like discursions on bagel shops or the slowness of the G train, or when our narrator looks through some brownstone window to watch this middle-aged man try on 10 different bathrobes.

“The Stolen Coast” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2023. While adrift in this sleepy coastal Massachusetts town, one man that ferries fugitives by day gets all twisted up in a plot to pilfer diamonds in a Casablanca infused heist novel.

Jack may well be a polished and Harvard educated lawyer on paper, however everybody in the down-in-the-heels, if picturesque, village of Onset, Massachusetts, knows his actual job: moving people around on the run from powerful enemies. The family business, which he co-manages with his dad, who is a retired spy, is smooth sailing, while they fill Onset’s holiday homes during the town’s long and drowsy off-season and help these clients shed their identities while preparing for fresh starts.

However when Jack’s former flame, Elena, who is a dedicated hustler that is no stranger to the fugitive life, makes her unexpected return to twon, her arrival upends Jack’s routine existence. Elena, after all, does not go anywhere at all without having some scheme in mind, and it is not that long before Jack finds himself being enmeshed in her most recent project: intercepting millions of dollars’ worth of raw diamonds before they are shipped overseas.