Charlie Donlea

About the Charlie Donlea series

Charlie Donlea writes twisty, cleanly-engineered standalone thrillers — the kind built around one irresistible hook and a final-act reversal that recontextualizes everything you've read. A Chicago native, he debuted with Summit Lake (2016), about a TV journalist picking apart the murder of a law student in a North Carolina mountain town, and has delivered a book roughly every year since. His recurring obsessions: cold cases reopened by outsiders, the machinery of true-crime media (documentaries, podcasts, tabloid infamy), and protagonists whose own pasts are tangled in the cases they investigate.

Highlights include The Girl Who Was Taken (2017), in which a forensic pathologist autopsies her way toward the truth of her sister's abduction; Some Choose Darkness (2019), which introduced his one recurring pair — forensic reconstructionist Rory Moore, brilliant and on the spectrum, and forensic psychologist Lane Phillips — who return in The Suicide House (2020); Twenty Years Later (2021), which threads a 9/11 mystery through a modern murder case; and Those Empty Eyes (2023), about a young woman acquitted of slaughtering her family and rebranded by the tabloids as "Empty Eyes Alexandra." Recent novels Long Time Gone (2024) and Guess Again (2025) continue the pattern: forensic detail, dual timelines, and endings engineered to be argued about in book clubs. For readers who devour Lisa Gardner or Riley Sager, Donlea is a reliable one-more-chapter machine.