Moe Prager

About the Moe Prager series

Moe Prager is a Brooklyn-born, wine-loving ex-NYPD cop turned private investigator, forced off the force by a knee injury sustained during the 1977 New York City blackout — the incident that opens the series and haunts Moe for its remainder. Reed Farrel Coleman built the series less around procedural puzzle-solving than around Moe's slow accumulation of regret: every case reopens some old wound in his own life, whether it's his complicated marriage to Katy, his relationship with his brother Aaron, or the daughter, Sarah, he comes to love as his own despite knowing the true circumstances of her conception. The first novel, Walking the Perfect Square (2001), sets the pattern that recurs throughout: a case rooted in the past collides with Moe's present, told with a mournful, literary voice that earned Coleman comparisons to Ross Macdonald more than to contemporary procedural writers.

The series moves in real time across more than a decade, tracking Moe from his years running a wine shop with his brother through later cases that draw him back into investigative work almost against his will. Coleman doesn't shy from letting consequences stick — marriages end, friends die, and the emotional cost of each case carries into the next book rather than resetting. The series concluded with The Hollow Girl (2014), which brings several long-running threads to a deliberate close. It won Coleman three consecutive Shamus Awards for Best P.I. Novel, making him the first writer to win the award in three straight years.