Gulliver Dowd

About the Gulliver Dowd series

Gulliver Dowd is a licensed New York private investigator who happens to be a little person — a detail Reed Farrel Coleman treats neither as a gimmick nor as something to overcome, but as one more fact of a life already defined by grief. Dowd became a PI after his twin sister, an NYPD officer, was murdered, a loss that sits under every case he takes. The four novellas were published as part of Orca Book Publishing's Rapid Reads line, aimed at adult readers who want a complete, fast, plot-driven story rather than a 300-page novel, and Coleman uses the compressed length to keep each entry tight and propulsive rather than sprawling.

Dirty Work (2013) opens the series with Dowd hired by his own high-school girlfriend to find her runaway daughter, who turns out to be his as well — the kind of personal complication that recurs through the series as cases keep intersecting with Dowd's own unresolved history. Valentino Pier (2013), The Boardwalk (2015), and Love and Fear (2016) continue in the same vein, pulling Dowd's sister's unsolved murder gradually back into focus as a low-simmering thread beneath each case's own plot. The series never grew beyond these four entries, but within the constraints of the novella format it built a genuinely serialized arc, closer in spirit to Coleman's Moe Prager novels than to a disposable quick-read spinoff.