Derek B Miller Books in Order

For Sheldon Horowitz in life order: How to Find Your Way in the Dark → Norwegian by Night.
For Sigrid Ødegård and crime fiction: Norwegian by Night → American by Day.
For standalone war and history: The Girl in Green → The Curse of Pietro Houdini.
For a change of genre: Radio Life → Quiet Time.

Derek B. Miller was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in nearby Wellesley. His family background is Jewish and traces back to Eastern Europe, and that mix of New England, memory, migration, and history shows up often in his fiction.

Books were not his only lane at first.

After Wellesley High School, Miller studied liberal arts at Sarah Lawrence College, then moved deeper into public policy and security studies. He earned a master’s degree in national security studies from Georgetown and later a PhD in international relations from the Graduate Institute in Geneva. He also spent time studying and working abroad, including in Israel, England, Hungary, Switzerland, Norway, and Spain.

His professional life began in international affairs in the 1990s. He worked around governments, think tanks, and United Nations organizations, focusing on conflict, disarmament, policy design, and the messy ways institutions make choices under pressure.

That work gave his novels a very useful tool kit: people arguing about big problems while still having to buy groceries, raise kids, make bad jokes, and survive the day.

Miller’s fiction started taking shape a few years after college, but his first novel took a winding road to readers. Norwegian by Night was first published in Norway in translation before appearing in English. It introduced Sheldon Horowitz, an elderly Jewish New Yorker in Oslo who becomes an unlikely protector to a young boy after witnessing a killing. The book won the CWA John Creasey Dagger Award for best first crime novel and gave Miller a character readers kept wanting to talk about.

He has not stayed in one neat box since then. The Girl in Green moves through Iraq and the long aftershocks of war. American by Day follows Norwegian police inspector Sigrid Ødegård to upstate New York, where an investigation becomes tangled with race, family, and American gun culture. How to Find Your Way in the Dark goes back to Sheldon’s youth in the years before World War II, while The Curse of Pietro Houdini turns to wartime Italy, art, survival, and a very slippery mentor.

The range is part of the fun. Miller writes crime, historical fiction, political thrillers, and science fiction, but he tends to return to a few steady concerns: outsiders in strange places, violence that echoes across decades, families under stress, and people trying to behave decently when the rules are not helping.

He now lives in Spain with his family, after many years abroad. His books still carry a strong New England thread, but they are rarely only about one place. They are about what happens when people cross borders, then discover the past has packed a bag and come along too.