Michael Lilly Books in Order

Michael Lilly was born in Provo, Utah, on April Fool's Day and grew up in Alpine, a small Utah town. He comes from a large family, with six siblings, and has described those early years as being full of people he loves.

His interest in storytelling started early. Once he learned to write, he filled pages with fantastic adventures and imaginary creatures. As an adult, that impulse shifted toward more philosophical and emotional questions, but the urge to make things up and put them on paper stayed put.

Lilly has said that growing up gay in a conservative Utah environment, and coming out as a teenager, brought both inner and outer conflict. Those experiences helped push him toward writing. It gave him a place to sort through ideas about identity, fear, mental health, and the ways people carry their histories.

Writing gave him room to make sense of a busy mind.

He did not assume he would become an author. Only after finishing a first draft did he start looking into how traditional publishing worked, encouraged by feedback from family, friends, an agent, and an editor. He has also written during night shifts, and completed Roadrunner by hand after laptops were no longer allowed at work.

His first published novel, Pond Scum, introduced Jeremy “Remy” Thorn, an Oregon detective with a secret life as a serial killer. Lilly built the book around questions of trauma and mental illness, while keeping the pressure on a man whose carefully controlled system begins to crack.

That story grew into the Darkthorn series. Roadrunner sends Remy and Todd to New Mexico under threat, then pulls Remy into another murder investigation. Thunder Falls follows Remy after his life in Wometzia falls apart, as questions about his family and the frightening world around him close in.

The past rarely stays quiet in Lilly's stories.

He later wrote The Shadow Puppeteer, a suspense novel about Cam, who leaves a successful life in Los Angeles to return to his childhood home after an apparent accident. Back there, he finds more than memories, including a darkness that has been tied to his family for years.

Lilly's fiction is dark, but it is interested in why people become who they are, not only in the crimes they commit. Detectives, killers, survivors, and people carrying old wounds all appear in his work. In a 2018 interview, he spoke about working with high-risk teenage girls at a behavioral treatment center and about his family's efforts to confront child abuse. He has said he wants his writing to shine a light on ongoing problems and help people connect.