Matthew Quirk

Matthew Quirk is an American thriller writer who studied history and literature at Harvard College before spending five years as a staff writer for The Atlantic, reporting on crime, private military contractors, the opium trade, terrorism prosecutions and international gangs -- reporting that gave him the institutional and security-world detail he has drawn on across his fiction since. His 2012 debut, The 500, introduced Mike Ford, a reformed con artist turned Washington lobbyist, and launched a two-book series followed by a second series centered on former Marine Special Operations officer John Hayes.

Since 2019 Quirk has written mainly standalone thrillers, each built around a protagonist working inside a high-security American institution -- the FBI, the Secret Service -- who is forced to use insider knowledge against a threat from within. The best known of these, The Night Agent (2019), became a Netflix series in 2023 and brought Quirk his widest audience to date; he has continued with Hour of the Assassin, Red Warning, Inside Threat, and the 2026 novel The Method.

Quirk lives in San Diego, California.