Joe Hilley Books in Order

Joe Hilley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 29, 1956, and grew up in Grand Bay on the Gulf Coast. That landscape stayed with him. Marshes, bays, small towns, weather, and the people who live close to the water all became part of the world he writes about.

Writing was not his first profession. Hilley earned degrees from Asbury College and Asbury Theological Seminary, then received his law degree from Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. He practiced criminal defense law, work that gave him a close view of courts, clients, pressure, and the compromises people make when things go wrong.

He wrote at night while practicing law. After finishing two unpublished manuscripts, he left the profession in 1999 to write full time.

His first novel, Sober Justice, arrived in 2004 and introduced Mike Connolly, a troubled Mobile attorney with a drinking problem, a damaged family life, and an unwanted talent for finding the truth. The later Connolly books, including Double Take, Electric Beach, Night Rain, and The Deposition, follow Mike through murder cases and larger criminal schemes along the Alabama coast.

The Gulf Coast is never just scenery in these books.

Hilley uses his legal background to keep the investigations rooted in interviews, evidence, courtroom pressure, and difficult choices. Mike is not a polished hero who always has the answer. He is a man trying to stay sober, do his job well, and repair some of the harm in his own life while facing people who would rather keep their secrets buried.

Outside the series, Hilley has moved between suspense, short fiction, biography, and nonfiction. What The Red Moon Knows sends an older woman on a strange Gulf Coast journey after she sees a man beside a yellow Cadillac who may be Elvis. The Legend of Dell Briggers begins with a childhood friend’s death and the discovery that much of the man’s life story may have been invented. Other People, Other Places collects shorter work about isolation, purpose, and the ways people carry their pasts.

His 2008 book Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader examined Palin’s public career, family life, faith, and leadership through Hilley’s perspective. It appeared on The New York Times best seller list during the 2008 presidential campaign. He also collaborated on nonfiction books, including The Walk with former football player Shaun Alexander and Desert Rose, a memoir by Edythe Scott Bagley about her sister, Coretta Scott King.

During the pandemic, Hilley turned his attention to number theory. Observations Regarding Non-Prime Odd Numbers grew from his independent exploration of patterns among composite odd numbers.

His work often returns to people at a crossroads. They may be lawyers, grieving friends, struggling families, or people with one bad decision behind them and another waiting ahead.

Hilley and his wife, Joy, have made Houston their home since 2011. He continues to write fiction and nonfiction shaped by the Gulf Coast, human complications, and a curiosity about what people do when ordinary life suddenly stops being ordinary.