Chuck Joseph Greaves Books in Order

Chuck Joseph Greaves grew up in Levittown, New York, one of six children raised in the planned Long Island suburb built for returning World War II veterans. His parents were among its early homeowners, and the neighborhood's ball fields, village greens, and closely packed houses gave him a childhood he still writes about with affection and a clear eye.

College took Greaves to Los Angeles in 1974. He graduated with honors from the University of Southern California, then earned his law degree, also with honors, from Boston College Law School. He returned to Los Angeles and spent the next 25 years as a trial lawyer, a career that gave him a close look at pressure, argument, ambition, and the odd ways people behave when the stakes get high.

He had plenty of jobs before and around that path, including construction work, bartending, and library work. Those experiences show up in his fiction as a feel for working lives and for the details that make a setting believable.

In 2006, Greaves made a big change. He and his wife, Lynda, left Los Angeles for Santa Fe, New Mexico, so he could give fiction writing his full attention. He had already written legal briefs and magazine pieces, including features for Los Angeles Lawyer, where he also served on the editorial board. Novels, though, asked for a different kind of leap.

That leap paid off with Hush Money, his 2012 debut as Chuck Greaves. The book introduced Pasadena lawyer Jack MacTaggart, an irreverent former public defender whose cases mix legal maneuvering with murder investigations. Jack returned in Green-Eyed Lady, The Last Heir, and, after a long break, The Chimera Club. Readers who enjoy smart, fast-moving mysteries with courtroom know-how and a dry sense of humor will find a good entry point there.

Greaves also writes as C. Joseph Greaves, usually for historical and contemporary fiction outside the MacTaggart series. Hard Twisted draws on a Depression-era true crime involving a young girl and a violent drifter. Tom & Lucky revisits the 1936 vice trial of Lucky Luciano through the competing lives of prosecutor Thomas Dewey, defense lawyer George Morton Levy, and witness Cokey Flo Brown. Both books use legal conflict as a way into larger stories about power, survival, and who gets believed.

Place matters in his work.

After living in Santa Fe, Greaves and Lynda moved to the Four Corners region of southwestern Colorado in 2012. That landscape became central to Church of the Graveyard Saints, a novel about a woman returning home to a family ranch as gas development divides her community. It brings together family history, environmental pressure, old loyalties, and the complicated question of whether anyone can really go home again.

Greaves has stayed active in the literary life of his adopted region. He helped build community reading programs and author events, wrote book reviews for years, and co-founded Four Corners Writers, a nonprofit that supports writers in the American Southwest. He has also worked as a screenwriter and lyricist.

His books move from sunlit Pasadena offices to Napa vineyards, Depression-era New York courtrooms, and red-rock country in Colorado. The common thread is people under strain, trying to tell their version of the truth before somebody else gets there first.