Gus Murphy

About the Gus Murphy series

Gus Murphy is a former Suffolk County police officer working security and driving the courtesy van for a rundown Long Island airport hotel, the kind of job he took after a heart attack ended his career and his teenage son's sudden death from an undiagnosed heart condition ended everything else. Where Coleman's Moe Prager novels are elegiac in a controlled, literary way, the two Gus Murphy books are rawer — grief here isn't backstory, it's the weather the whole series lives in, and Gus's marriage is quietly collapsing under its weight even as the plot moves forward.

Where It Hurts (2016) opens with a stranger, an ex-con Gus once arrested, asking for help investigating his own son's unsolved murder — a case that forces Gus back into the kind of work he'd walked away from, and back into contact with a police force that no longer fully trusts him. What You Break (2017) continues directly from the fallout, widening Gus's found-family cast (including a Kurdish cook and an ex-priest-turned-hotel-employee who both become recurring allies) while keeping the same unresolved grief at the center. Coleman has not returned to Gus Murphy since 2017, with his subsequent original crime writing moving to the Nick Ryan series instead, but the two books stand as a complete, self-contained arc rather than a series cut short mid-plot.