Matt Goldman Books in Order

If you want the main detective series: Gone to Dust → Broken Ice → The Shallows → Dead West
If you want the darker, more personal Nils books: Dead West → Dark Humor
If you prefer family-centered standalones: Carolina Moonset → A Good Family → Still Waters
If you want a TV-world mystery with a cold case: The Murder Show
If you want a new small-town series: Liar's Creek

Matt Goldman grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, and books were always part of the picture. So was comedy. While studying at the University of Minnesota, he saw live stand-up, tried it himself, and found the kind of work that made immediate sense to him.

That led to club work, and eventually to opening for Jerry Seinfeld.

From there Goldman moved into television, first in Los Angeles and then across a long run of network and studio jobs. He wrote for the early seasons of Seinfeld, later worked on Ellen, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and won an Emmy for his TV work. He also wrote plays along the way, which helps explain why his novels have such a good ear for people talking past each other, around each other, and straight into trouble.

Even with all that screenwriting experience, novels gave him something television could not. Goldman has described himself as an introvert and a daydreamer, and book writing let him work in his own voice instead of in a room full of writers, actors, executives, and notes. Around 2015, between TV jobs, he started reading crime fiction with fresh attention, especially Raymond Chandler, and realized the wit and observation he had spent years sharpening could fit naturally inside a mystery.

That shift produced Gone to Dust, his 2017 debut. The book introduced Minneapolis private investigator Nils Shapiro and quickly put Goldman on the mystery map, landing bestseller attention and award nominations. Readers who warm to his work usually point to the same things: sharp dialogue, short chapters, strong momentum, and characters who feel recognizably human even when the plot turns strange.

He kept going with Broken Ice, The Shallows, Dead West, and later Dark Humor, building Nils into the kind of series detective readers want to spend time with. The cases are clever, but the real engine is character, family friction, friendship, grief, money, and the little absurdities people reveal when they're under pressure.

Goldman has not stayed in one lane.

His standalones, including Carolina Moonset, A Good Family, Still Waters, The Murder Show, and Liar's Creek, show the same interests from different angles. He likes old hometowns, buried history, family secrets, and the uneasy space between love and resentment. He also has a strong sense of place, especially Minnesota, which keeps showing up in his fiction as something more than scenery.

That Minnesota connection runs deep. He spent years away on the West Coast before returning home, and his books often feel like arguments for why the state works so well in crime fiction, snow, lakes, suburbs, small towns, long memories, and all. Even when he sends a story elsewhere, as in Carolina Moonset or Dead West, he stays interested in the same question: what happens when the past stops behaving like the past?

These days Goldman lives in Minneapolis with his wife, two dogs, and two cats. After a long television career, he seems to have found a second act that suits him, page by page, joke by joke, and murder by murder.