Corey Lynn Fayman Books in Order

Corey Lynn Fayman has spent much of his working life in and around San Diego, California, a place that also supplies the streets, beaches, bars, and odd corners of his fiction. He has joked about avoiding the sunlight in his hometown, but his books make good use of the city’s mix of coastal beauty, music culture, tech ambition, and local history.

Before turning to novels, Fayman had a varied creative career. He played keyboards in local bands, worked as a live sound technician and theatrical sound designer, and later moved into interactive design during the first Internet boom. He also taught technology and design courses at Southern California colleges and universities.

He studied creative writing at UCLA and earned a master’s degree in educational technology from San Diego State University. After years in corporate and interactive work, he found himself missing the more direct, messy pleasure of making things up. Around 2006, boredom with that work and a wish to return to his creative roots pushed him toward writing his first mystery.

The idea stuck.

That first novel, Black’s Beach Shuffle, introduced Rolly Waters, a guitar-playing private detective whose work pulls him into San Diego’s dot-com culture after a body turns up at a startup party. Fayman drew on his own time at MP3.com when building that setting. The book was nominated for a San Diego Book Award, and Fayman liked writing Rolly enough to keep following him into new cases.

The Rolly Waters books mix private-eye plotting with live-music lore, dry jokes, and a close feel for Southern California. Border Field Blues takes Rolly toward the U.S.-Mexico border and won the Genre Award at the 2013 Hollywood Book Festival. Desert City Diva follows a missing-person case into the desert and received a bronze honor in the 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards. Ballast Point Breakdown earned the Geisel Award for best in show at the 2021 San Diego Book Awards.

Later Rolly adventures keep music close to the center of the trouble. In Gillespie Field Groove, a search for a possibly historic guitar opens up an old crime and the darker side of the music business. Fayman also moved into historical crime fiction with The Esmeralda Goodbye, set in 1950s La Jolla, and The Deadly Stingaree, which travels back to 1891 San Diego.

Music never disappeared from his life. Fayman has written and recorded songs, and his years as a working musician give Rolly’s gigs, gear, and band friendships the lived-in details of someone who knows the difference between playing a tune and hauling the equipment.

He has said that he is now retired from teaching, though he continues to write and occasionally record new music. His books return to people trying to do the decent thing when money, history, family, and bad decisions make that harder than it sounds.