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.

How to read this series

Donlea writes standalones, so you can start anywhere — there is no continuing saga, and publication order is simply the tidiest path through his catalog. Most readers begin either with Summit Lake (his debut) or with his most celebrated hooks: The Girl Who Was Taken or Twenty Years Later.

The one ordering rule that matters: read Some Choose Darkness before The Suicide House, and both before Behind Every Face. All three share his recurring characters, forensic reconstructionist Rory Moore and psychologist Lane Phillips, and each later book references the earlier ones' outcomes. Everything else is fair game in any order, though publication order lets you watch his plotting get progressively more ambitious, from straight small-town murder mystery to the true-crime-media hall of mirrors in Those Empty Eyes and Guess Again.