David B Lyons Books in Order

David B. Lyons grew up in inner-city Dublin, Ireland, a place that has stayed close to his work. His early thrillers are rooted in the city’s streets, homes, workplaces, and private pressures, even when the trouble at their center becomes much bigger than one neighborhood.

Before turning to novels full-time, Lyons spent 15 years in journalism. He worked on the sports desks of national newspapers, wrote about football, reviewed music, and for a time wrote a celebrity column for a Sunday tabloid. It was a busy, deadline-heavy life, and he was trying to write fiction around it.

That combination wasn’t easy to keep up.

In 2015, Lyons left journalism and gave himself the structure to finish a manuscript. Within six months, he had completed his debut novel and secured a three-book publishing deal. The move from newsroom deadlines to novel writing shows in his early books, which often put ordinary people under a hard time limit and let the pressure build hour by hour.

His first published thriller, Midday, follows a Dublin bank manager ordered to steal millions before noon if he wants to save his partner. It launched the Tick-Tock trilogy, a set of connected stories built around tight deadlines, personal stakes, and people forced to make impossible choices. Whatever Happened to Betsy Blake? introduced private investigator Lenny Moon and a missing-child case that refuses to stay in the past.

Then came the Trial trilogy: She Said, Three Said, The Curious Case of Faith & Grace, and The Coincidence. These books put readers close to juries, investigations, and retrials, asking them to weigh evidence without being handed an easy answer. The setups are uncomfortable on purpose, involving allegations, grief, family loyalty, and the damage caused when public opinion rushes ahead of the facts.

Lyons later widened his canvas with the America trilogy, beginning with In The Middle of Middle America. The books follow several intersecting lives while television anchor Sarah-Jane Zdanski and the media machine around her look for the next story. The Footage That Shook America and The Murders That Killed America continue that interest in surveillance, technology, news coverage, and who gets to shape the public narrative.

He has also written Alex: The Man Behind The Legend, a biography of football manager Sir Alex Ferguson. That subject makes sense for a former football writer, and it sits beside his fiction as a reminder of the reporting background he brought to publishing.

Teaching has remained part of Lyons’s working life. He began guest lecturing while still a journalist and has taught creative writing and media-related subjects at colleges and schools in Ireland and the United Kingdom. He is also an editor and screenwriter.

These days, Lyons lives in Birmingham, England, with his wife Kerry and their daughter Lola, while retaining strong ties to Dublin. His books tend to begin with a direct question: what would you do if time had nearly run out?