David Levein Books in Order

David Levien was born in Great Neck, New York, and grew up on Long Island. He studied at the University of Michigan, then moved to Los Angeles and worked as a story editor for agencies and production companies. The move put him inside the film business early. It also showed him how easy it was to spend all day helping other people tell stories and none telling your own.

He had wanted to write since he was young.

Levien has said he was a big reader long before he was a working writer, even if the early pages did not come easily. The first novel he wrote in his early twenties, Wormwood, took years of rewriting before it was published in 1999. Set in a warped version of Hollywood, it follows a young studio insider losing patience with the system around him. You can already see the things that would stay in Levien's work, ambition, moral wear, and people trying to keep hold of a private code.

Screenwriting opened another lane. With longtime collaborator Brian Koppelman, whom he met as a teenager, Levien broke through with Rounders, the poker film that follows Mike McDermott through New York's underground card rooms. Their partnership kept going through projects such as Runaway Jury, Ocean's Thirteen, and The Illusionist, and later into the television dramas Billions and Super Pumped.

He does not really separate the two sides of the job.

When Levien turned toward crime fiction, he did it as a lifelong fan of the genre. He has spoken about reading writers like Chandler and Hammett when he was young, and about being haunted for years by stories of missing children. That thread runs straight into City of the Sun, the first Frank Behr novel, where a vanished boy draws a weary Indianapolis investigator into a long, painful search. Levien chose the Midwest on purpose. The ordinary look of the setting makes the danger feel closer to home.

Frank Behr became the center of Levien's fiction. In City of the Sun, Where the Dead Lay, Thirteen Million Dollar Pop, and Signature Kill, Behr moves through cases involving abduction, murder, political money, and a predator who can hide inside everyday life. Readers who like these books usually respond to the same mix, hard movement, close observation, and characters who carry real damage instead of movie version damage. The Behr books also brought Levien award nominations, including Edgar, Hammett, Shamus, and Barry recognition.

His standalones show a different kind of bite. Swagbelly is a dark satire about a wealthy pornographer whose expensive life is coming apart in public and in private. Wormwood is meaner, sadder, and funnier than a simple Hollywood send-up. Even when Levien shifts settings, he keeps circling the same human mess, hunger, status, loyalty, guilt, and the stories people tell themselves so they can keep going.

Today he lives in Connecticut and continues to work across novels, film, and television. He also won a Sports Emmy for the ESPN 30 for 30 film This Is What They Want. That range helps explain why his books feel so sharply built. The screen work gives them drive. The novels give him room to stay with people after the noise dies down.