Tony Spinosa

Tony Spinosa is the pen name Reed Farrel Coleman used for a trilogy of hardboiled Long Island crime novels — Hose Monkey (2006), Gun Bunnies (2007), and The Fourth Victim (2008) — centered on disgraced ex-NYPD detective Joe Serpe. Coleman has said the pseudonym let him write in a pulpier, faster-paced register than the one his own name carried by that point in his career, thanks to the literary reputation built by his Moe Prager mysteries. The Serpe novels trade Moe Prager's Brooklyn and its generational weight for the blue-collar North Shore of Long Island, following Serpe's uneasy business partnership with Bob Healy, the former Internal Affairs investigator who helped end his police career. The trilogy was not continued past 2008, and later editions and digital reissues sometimes credit the books to Reed Farrel Coleman directly or to "Tony Spinosa (Reed Farrel Coleman)," reflecting the eventual public link between the two names.