Joseph Souza Books in Order

If you want psychological suspense: The Neighbor → Pray for the Girl → The Perfect Daughter
If you want darker, character-driven crime: Cruel & Bitter Things → Cruel to Be Kind
If you want outbreak horror: The Reawakening → Darpocalypse → Darmageddon
If you want bioterror thriller energy: The Liger Plague → Lethal Chain
If you want standalone Maine suspense: Unpaved Surfaces → Need To Find You

Joseph Souza grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, in a family full of barbers. His father cut hair, and so did other relatives, so barbering was always there in the background, less a romantic calling than a practical trade you could carry with you. As a teenager, his father sent him to barber school so he would always have something to fall back on.

He did not take a straight path to writing. Souza studied at Northeastern University, earning degrees in political science and history, and later picked up a master's degree in education from the University of Washington. Through Northeastern's co-op program he worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, D.C., helping gather intelligence on organized crime and drug trafficking. He also spent time working on the South Boston waterfront, close enough to real-world violence and pressure to see how power moves when nobody wants to name it.

He started writing fiction seriously in college.

The day jobs kept changing, but the material kept arriving.

For a stretch he taught middle and high school in Seattle, where he also met his wife. Teaching gave him steady work, but it also left him worn out, and he found it hard to protect enough energy for fiction. In 2001 he moved back east, settled in Maine, and returned to barbering, a job that gave him room to write while also keeping him close to people. That matters in Souza's work. His books are full of people under pressure, and a barber chair is a pretty good place to study how people talk when they let their guard down.

Before the novels, there were short stories and essays. His story Loss Prevention won the 2004 Andre Dubus Award for short fiction, and The Stone Walls of Lebanon received honorable mention for the Al Blanchard Award. Those early pieces helped establish the mix he still works with now, crime, dread, dark humor, and an interest in the private motives people hide even from themselves.

His novels move across genres, but they keep a recognizable pulse. The Reawakening, which won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Speculative Fiction, begins as a farm-set horror story and opens into a wider apocalypse. Darpocalypse and Darmageddon build on that world with more movement, more danger, and a bigger sense of collapse. In The Liger Plague and Lethal Chain, he shifts toward bioterror thriller territory, where engineered disease and human bad judgment make an ugly combination.

He is just as comfortable writing crime and psychological suspense. Unpaved Surfaces centers on a missing child and the grief that settles over a Maine town long after the first panic fades. The Neighbor, Pray for the Girl, and The Perfect Daughter all dig into secrets, unreliable appearances, and the trouble waiting beneath respectable communities. More recent books like The Anchorman's Wife, Cruel & Bitter Things, and Cruel to Be Kind lean even harder into moral messiness, especially when damaged people start convincing themselves they are doing the right thing.

Souza lives in Maine with his wife and two children. His long resume, barber, teacher, cabbie, social worker, truck driver, editor, bouncer, paralegal, and DEA analyst among other jobs, helps explain why his fiction feels grounded even when the plots turn wild. He writes about monsters sometimes, but he rarely forgets the human part.