Christopher Smith Books in Order

If you want the New York revenge thriller first: Fifth Avenue → Running of the Bulls → From Manhattan with Love → From Manhattan with Revenge
If you want to finish that arc: A Rush to Violence → Park Avenue
If you want paranormal revenge with a YA edge: Bullied → Revenge → Witch → War
If you prefer a dark standalone: You Only Die Twice
If you want his film-critic side: Queued! → Queued! The Best and Worst of Netflix in 101 Independent Movie Reviews, Vol. 2 → Your Movie Gave Me Hives

Christopher Smith built one writing career before he fully stepped into the next. For years, readers in Maine knew him as a film critic first. He wrote for the Bangor Daily News, appeared on regional NBC affiliates, spent two years on the E! network, and logged more than 4,000 reviews. One high point of that run came when he was named Best Critic in 2010.

But fiction came first.

While studying English and business at the University of Maine, Smith started working on what would become Fifth Avenue. He later earned a master's degree there, too. In his twenties, he was also making regular trips to New York, seeing the moneyed world that would feed the novel's setting. He was drawn to the darker side of wealth, ambition, and revenge, but life moved in another direction for a while.

He went on to do communications work at the university and built a long run as a critic, so the novel sat unfinished for years. Then, in 2010, with encouragement from his father, he went back to the manuscript and published it as an ebook. The timing mattered, but so did the work. Fifth Avenue found readers quickly, and that fast start changed the shape of his career.

Smith did not stop with one hit. He followed Fifth Avenue with Running of the Bulls, a thriller sparked in part by a trip to Pamplona, and later expanded the same world through From Manhattan with Love, From Manhattan with Revenge, A Rush to Violence, and Park Avenue. Those books return again and again to old grudges, money that cannot erase the past, and families discovering that privilege is a weak shield when violence gets personal.

He also moved in a very different direction with Bullied, Revenge, Witch, and War. Those books follow Seth Moore, a badly bullied teenager who suddenly gains supernatural power. Smith has connected that series to his own experience with bullying when he was young, and that personal angle gives the story a sharper bite. The central question is not just whether Seth can fight back. It is whether he can keep from becoming the thing he hates.

He can go darker still.

In You Only Die Twice, Smith trades Manhattan wealth for the Maine woods and traps Cheryl Dunning in a survival story involving two religious fanatics. It is a good example of how he shifts settings without losing pressure. Whether he is writing about Park Avenue money, Wall Street fallout, or backwoods terror, he likes characters under strain and stories that keep tightening.

There is another side to his work, too. The Queued! books and Your Movie Gave Me Hives collect his film criticism, and they show the same sharp eye that runs through the novels. Readers who like dry humor and a critic who does not waste time softening a bad opinion will probably enjoy those collections as much as the thrillers.

Smith lives in Maine. His path makes a lot of sense when you look back at it: years of learning how stories work, years of writing on deadline, then a jump into fiction that found a large ebook readership. If you pick up one of his books, you are usually getting motion, trouble, and people pushed right to the edge.