Dave Gurney

About the Dave Gurney series

Dave Gurney is a retired NYPD homicide detective -- one of the department's most celebrated, with an unmatched closure record -- who moves with his wife Madeleine to a farmhouse in rural upstate New York expecting a quiet retirement, and instead keeps getting pulled back into puzzle-box murder investigations that only his particular gift for pattern recognition can unravel. John Verdon launched the series in 2010 with Think of a Number, in which a stranger mails Gurney's old acquaintance a letter correctly predicting the number he'll silently choose -- a piece of impossible-seeming misdirection that turns out to be the signature of a serial killer playing an elaborate game.

Verdon writes fair-play puzzle mysteries in the classic sense: every clue the reader needs is on the page, and the pleasure is in watching Gurney's forensic, detail-obsessed mind work through a killer's elaborate scheme before the reveal. The tension between Gurney's compulsion to keep investigating and Madeleine's wish for him to actually retire runs through the whole series as a quieter counter-thread to the increasingly baroque murder plots. Verdon came to crime fiction late, after a career in New York advertising and a decade building Shaker-style furniture, and set the entire series in the Catskills landscape where he and his wife settled.