Reed Farrel Coleman (born in Brooklyn, New York) is a New York Times bestselling American crime and mystery novelist, short story writer, and poet, with more than thirty-three published novels including the continuation of Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone series. He has been called the noir poet laureate by The Huffington Post and a hard-boiled poet by NPR's Maureen Corrigan. He is a four-time Edgar Award nominee across three different categories (Best Novel, Best Paperback Original, Best Short Story) and a four-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year, plus the Audie, Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards.
His signature original series is the Moe Prager Mysteries (Walking the Perfect Square, Redemption Street, The James Deans, Soul Patch, Empty Ever After, Innocent Monster, Hurt Machine, Onion Street, The Hollow Girl), about an ex-NYPD cop turned private investigator and wine merchant working through the vanished cases of his Brooklyn life across decades. The series has been shortlisted for the Edgar (twice), has won the Shamus three times, and is frequently cited as one of the best-written PI series of the past quarter century. His Gus Murphy series (Where It Hurts, What You Break, Sleepless City) follows a Suffolk County cop forced into retirement by the death of his son, working private security and the cases that follow him into the dark.
Since 2014 he has written six novels in the Jesse Stone series continuing the late Robert B. Parker's police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts (Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot, Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins, Robert B. Parker's Debt to Pay, Robert B. Parker's The Hangman's Sonnet, Robert B. Parker's Colorblind, Robert B. Parker's The Bitterest Pill). His standalone novels include Gun Church and the collaborative novel Tower co-written with Irish crime writer Ken Bruen. He writes also under the pseudonym Tony Spinosa.
He is a former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America, an adjunct instructor of English at Hofstra University, and a founding member of MWA University. He lives in Suffolk County on Long Island with his wife Rosanne and their cats.
