Alex Finlay

Alex Finlay is the pen name of Anthony Franze, a Washington, D.C. appellate lawyer who has argued more than 40 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and taught appellate practice and federal jurisdiction at Michigan State University from 2004 to 2014. Franze built a first writing career as Anthony Franze, publishing legal thrillers including The Advocate's Daughter, The Outsider, and The Last Justice. In 2021 he adopted the Finlay pseudonym for a new run of psychological thrillers, starting with Every Last Fear, aimed at a broader commercial audience than his courtroom-set fiction had reached.

Writing as Finlay, he has published a string of instant bestsellers -- The Night Shift (2022), What Have We Done (2023), If Something Happens to Me (2024), Parents Weekend (2025), and The Anniversary (2026) -- each a standalone built around multiple unreliable narrators and a crime whose consequences resurface years later. His novels have been translated into more than two dozen languages, several have been optioned for film and television, and he serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Born in Opelika, Alabama, Franze now lives in Washington, D.C.