Jonathan Santlofer Books In Order

Publication Order of Kate McKinnon Books

Publication Order of Nate Rodriguez Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Akashic Drug Chronicles Books

Publication Order of L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Jonathan Santlofer
Jonathan Santlofer is an artist and author. “Anatomy of Fear” won the 2009 Nero Award for best crime novel and he has won two National Endowment for the Arts grants, has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy In Rome, the Vermont Studio Center.

He is contributor/editor of “LA Noire: The Collected Stories” and Akashic Books’ “The Marijuana Chronicles” and he co-edited, contributed, and illustrated the short story anthology “The Dark End of the Street”. He also edited and created “It Occurs to Me that I Am America”, a New York Times ‘Notable Book’.

Jonathan’s stories have appeared in various collections, including “The Rich and the Dead” (edited by Nelson De Mille), “New Jersey Noir” (edited by Joyce Carol Oates), “Alive in Form and Color” and “In Sunlight and In Shadow, which are two anthologies edited by Lawrence Block. His stories have also appeared in publications like the Strand Magazine and Ellery Queen Magazine.

He was the director and creator of Center For Fiction’s CRIME FICTION ACADEMY, the only program devoted exclusively to crime writing. He’s taught Crime Fiction Writing, the graphic novel and Drawing in Pratt Institute’s Creative Writing program, Columbia University and The New School. He has given numerous workshops at writing festivals and conferences, he’s been a sought after lecturer at colleges, and has been to museums and universities across the country, among them are LA MOCA and the Whitney Museum of America.

Jonathan, also a well known artist, has had his work exhibited in over 200 exhibitions worldwide and is included in numerous public, private, and corporate collections, among them the Newark Museum, NJ, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Art Institute of Chicago, IL, and Tokyo’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Japan.

His work has been reviewed and written about extensively. He’s been profiled in publications like Entertainment Weekly, Newsday, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today. He’s been the subject of a Sunday NY Times Magazine “Questions For” column.

“The Death Artist” is the first novel in the “Kate McKinnon” series and was released in 2002. Murder is a fine art. Kate McKinnon, a former New York cop, lives a life of luxury and wealth that she never would’ve ever dreamed was possible. After her marriage to an elite businessman, her post-police career as an art historian has skyrocketed her to fortune and fame.

Her life’s perfect, right up until the point that a young woman gets murdered and one of Kate’s close friends becomes the prime suspect. Kate’s old cop instincts naturally reemerge while she delves deeper into this case. Pretty soon, two other killings related to the New York art world occur, and Kate finds that this killer, now known as “the Death Artist”, is communicating with her specifically, leaving clues as Polaroids and some jumbled pieces of artwork. And somehow, Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting “The Death of Marat” is at the core of this murder spree. But how so?

There are so many suspects among this big cast of characters, that you will never see the complicated plot twists coming in this intense debut, which moves so fast that you may just suffer friction burns turning these pages to keep up.

Wedging himself stylistically between the high octane plots of James Patterson and the gritty stories of Michael Connelly, Jonathan Santloffer (a noted New York painter) expands his palette to include the written word. Cunningly, he crafts this absorbing portrait of obsession.

“Color Blind” is the second novel in the “Kate McKinnon” series and was released in 2004. Kate McKinnon is back, and this time around it’s personal.

These two hideously eviscerated bodies are found and the only connection between either of them is this bizarre painting that’s left at each crime scene. The NYPD turns to Kate McKinnon, the woman that brought the serial killer the Death Artist to justice. Having settled back into her satisfying life as published author, wife of a top New York lawyer, art historian, and host of a weekly PBS TV series, she wants no part of it.

However her sense of tranquility is ruined when this new series of murders hits too close to home. With her fury and grief fueling her, she rejoins detective Floyd Brown, her former partner, and his elite homicide team on the hunt for this vicious psychopath that is known as the Color Blind Killer. In her desperation and rage, she allows herself to be pulled into this lethal game of cat and mouse. She abandons her glamorous life for the gritty streets in Manhattan, immersing herself in a world where madness and brutality appear to be normal, where those that are closest to her might have betrayed her, and where, in the end, nothing is like it seems.

“Anatomy of Fear” is the first novel in the “Nate Rodriguez” series and was released in 2007. Nate Rodriguez works as a police sketch artist for the NYPD, and his success rate is high, with one out of three of his drawings leading to an arrest. However when he’s faced with an unusually talented murderer, he realizes that he might just have met his match. For this killer is a man that’s very much like himself, a man that thinks and sees in pictures. A killer that leaves drawings behind at the crime scenes that portray his murders in a gory, chilling, and prescient detail.

While Nate’s portraits get more and more accurate images of this madman, the killer figures out a way to steal his portraits, and then actually imitates Nate’s own hand. The conflicting evidence leads the cops to begin suspecting that Nate himself might be the killer and it pushes Nate into a frightening cat-and-mouse chase to catch his quarry. Art and artifice, life and death have never been this vividly bound together.

Jonathan pushes the boundaries of the thriller novel to new heights with this masterful blend of suspense and art. With sequential sketches which alternate throughout the text-first the killer’s and then Nate’s, Jonathan teases the reader with psychological details and irresistible clues that are delivered in an original way.