Mark Allen Smith Books in Order

Mark Allen Smith came to fiction after a career built around stories meant for a screen. Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, he worked as a television and documentary-film producer and as a screenwriter. Those jobs put research, interviews, and the steady work of shaping a narrative at the center of his professional life.

One important stop was ABC News's 20/20, where Smith worked on investigative features. While looking into a case from 1970s Paraguay involving the torture and murder of a teenager, he began considering what fear does to a person, and what it means to force someone to tell the truth. The material stayed with him.

The death of Lisa Steinberg, an abused child in New York City, gave that concern another focus. Smith has connected both events to his interest in the corrosive effects of physical and psychological pressure on children and other people with little power. He decided a novel could carry those questions to a wider audience.

That decision became The Inquisitor, his first novel, published in 2012.

In The Inquisitor, Smith introduces Geiger, a man who can spot lies as soon as he hears them and uses that ability in the shadowy business of information retrieval. Geiger's strict personal code, especially his refusal to work on children, collides with the job at the heart of the book. The result is a dark New York thriller that spends as much time with Geiger's self-control and buried history as it does with the chase around him.

Readers who pick it up will find a lead character built from contradictions. Geiger makes a living frightening people into honesty, yet he draws a hard line around children and has a real, if guarded, capacity for protection. Harry Boddicker, his former-journalist partner, gives the story a more grounded counterweight and helps pull the private world of the novels into the open.

Nothing stays neatly contained for long.

The Confessor continues the Geiger story with its central figure missing and presumed dead. Harry searches, while Geiger's rival Dalton and the dangerous Zanni Soames have their own reasons to reach him first. The book moves between New York and Paris, widening the map without leaving behind the series' main concern: how a person can survive the past when it refuses to remain buried.

Smith's background in documentary work shows up in the questions his fiction asks, while his screenwriting experience suits a plot that needs to keep moving. He has named writers including Herman Melville, John Barth, J. P. Donleavy, Harry Crews, and Raymond Chandler among his favorites. Music is another recurring interest in his life; he has listed listening, playing, and composing as hobbies, alongside softball.

Publisher material describes Smith as a longtime Westchester County resident who later lived in Harlem, New York, with his wife, Cathy, and their blended family of six children. He has also described writing at home in an office, at a desk with a laptop. It fits the practical, workmanlike route behind the Geiger books.