Charlie Donlea Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Summit Lake → The Girl Who Was Taken → Don't Believe It.
If you like cold-case series with recurring sleuths: Some Choose Darkness → The Suicide House.
If you enjoy true-crime TV and podcasts on the page: Don't Believe It → Twenty Years Later → The Suicide House.
If you prefer twisty standalone thrillers: Those Empty Eyes → Long Time Gone → Guess Again.

Charlie Donlea grew up in Chicago and still calls the city home, splitting his time between a career in ophthalmology and writing twisty crime novels. He lives there with his wife and two children, juggling clinic days with long stretches at the keyboard.

For a long time, books were not a big part of his life. He has said that he made it through school without reading a single novel, until picking up John Grisham’s The Firm in his early twenties changed his ideas about what a story could do.

That experience turned him into a steady reader and planted the seed for writing his own fiction. When he finally sat down to draft a thriller, his goal was simple: to create the same kind of propulsive, high-stakes reading experience that had hooked him as a new fan.

His debut, Summit Lake, introduced readers to his blend of scenic small-town settings, complicated investigations, and characters carrying private wounds. The book follows a young reporter digging into the murder of a law student at a mountain lake community and set the tone for many of the stories that followed.

Follow-up novels such as The Girl Who Was Taken, Don’t Believe It, and Twenty Years Later pushed deeper into cold cases, forensic detail, and the blurred line between true crime and entertainment. Readers often point to the way his plots use podcasts, documentaries, and news programs to show how a single crime can echo through families, courts, and the media for years.

Along the way he has created a loose web of recurring characters: forensic pathologist Livia Cutty, forensic reconstructionist Rory Moore, profiler Lane Phillips, legal investigator Alex Armstrong, forensic‑genealogy fellow Sloan Hastings, and others who step in and out of different books. Many of them are women working in technical, detail-heavy jobs, and their expertise—rather than brute force—is usually what cracks the case.

Donlea’s medical training gives him a comfortable grasp of anatomy and forensic science, but his thrillers stay focused on people rather than jargon. He tends to build stories around a single haunting question—a vanished girl, unidentified remains, a family massacre—and then layers in shifting timelines, unreliable accounts, and small clues that only make sense in hindsight.

Outside the clinic and the writing desk, he spends part of each year fishing with his father in remote parts of Canada that are reachable only by floatplane. Those trips, with their quiet lakes and sense of isolation, helped shape the atmospheres of novels like Summit Lake and later books.

At home, he reads widely in crime and suspense, keeps up with television series and sports, and tends to test his twists on the people closest to him. His books are now published around the world, but the stories remain grounded in everyday fears: what happens when a long-buried secret surfaces, or when a single piece of evidence finally tells the truth.