Gregg Olsen

Gregg Olsen was born March 5, 1959, in Seattle, Washington, and earned a journalism degree from Western Washington University, where he edited Klipsun Magazine and was managing editor of the campus paper, The Western Front. He spent the first two decades of his career writing true crime -- books like Abandoned Prayers, Bitter Almonds, and Starvation Heights built his reputation for turning real Pacific Northwest cases into meticulously reported narrative nonfiction, and he later won the Idaho Book of the Year award for The Deep Dark (2005), about the 1972 Sunshine Mine fire. Olsen moved into crime fiction with A Wicked Snow in 2007 and has since built six detective series -- Waterman & Stark, Emily Kenyon, Empty Coffin, Nicole Foster, the young-adult Vengeance duology, and the ongoing Detective Megan Carpenter books -- alongside a run of standalone thrillers, nearly all set in the same fog-bound Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula towns his true-crime reporting first took him to. That reporting background shows in the fiction's procedural texture and its patient unspooling of small-town secrets. He is a #1 New York Times and Amazon Charts bestselling author of more than 30 books, an International Thriller Writers Award finalist, and continues to publish new fiction, most recently Final Victim (2025).