Phoef Sutton

Phoef Sutton is an American television writer and novelist, an Emmy Award-winning veteran of series including Cheers, who moved into co-authored commercial fiction through two ongoing collaborations with Janet Evanovich. In the Lizzy and Diesel series, he co-writes the story of a Salem, Massachusetts pastry chef who discovers she is a hereditary 'Unmentionable' tasked with keeping four supernatural stones out of the wrong hands, aided by Diesel, an immortal bounty hunter for the universe's good guys — a lighter, more overtly paranormal spin on Evanovich's usual mismatched-partners formula. Sutton also co-writes the Knight and Moon series with Evanovich, pairing Emerson Knight, a reclusive billionaire genius with an eidetic memory and no grasp of normal social conventions, with Riley Moon, the buttoned-up junior bank analyst assigned to keep him in line after he stumbles onto a conspiracy much bigger than he expected. His television-writing background shows through in both series' tight comic pacing and dialogue-driven set pieces, translating skills honed in network sitcom writers' rooms into fast-moving genre fiction. Sutton's dual career, spanning acclaimed television comedy and bestselling collaborative fiction, makes him one of the more unusual co-authors working in commercial genre publishing.