Phoef Sutton Books in Order

If you want funny, bruising LA crime: Crush → Heart Attack and Vine → Colorado Boulevard
If you like odd-couple mystery adventure: Curious Minds
If you want supernatural suspense: Midnight Special → Reborn
If you prefer eerie, emotional standalones: Fifteen Minutes to Live → From Away

Phoef Sutton grew up in Virginia after being born in Washington, D.C. In college at James Madison University, he was acting, writing plays, and figuring out that story was the thing he kept coming back to.

Theater came first.

At James Madison, he won the Norman Lear Award for Comedy Playwriting while still an undergraduate. After graduation, his plays were produced at regional theaters, his play Burial Customs was selected for publication, and he received a National Endowment for the Arts playwrights fellowship. He was learning how to be a working writer before Hollywood ever called.

After he got married and moved to Los Angeles, television became the big turning point. He started on Cheers, stayed for eight years, and moved from staff writer to executive producer. Along the way he picked up two Emmys and a Writers Guild Award, and he learned how to make scenes move fast, land a joke cleanly, and keep a story moving.

That rhythm never really left him.

Readers can feel it in his fiction. The Caleb Rush books, Crush, Heart Attack and Vine, and Colorado Boulevard, mix bruising action with dry jokes, Los Angeles grit, and a hero who is part bodyguard, part bouncer, and part reluctant rescuer. If you like crime novels with momentum and a strong sense of place, those are a good place to begin.

He has also taken that speed into stranger territory. Fifteen Minutes to Live starts with a dead woman at a front door and turns into a romantic thriller built on memory and disorientation. From Away, set in Maine, shifts into supernatural family drama, giving him room for grief, ghosts, and the odd ways people protect each other. His work on Midnight Special and Reborn shows the same interest in horror with a pulpy engine underneath it.

Sutton has spent much of his career moving between mediums. Beyond Cheers, he has written or produced for shows including Newhart, NewsRadio, and Boston Legal, co-created the cult sitcom Thanks, and later wrote mystery movies and ran Chesapeake Shores for its final seasons. That back-and-forth between stage, screen, and prose helps explain why his novels are so visual and dialogue-driven.

There is also a clear thread through the books. Sutton likes outsiders, damaged charmers, accidental investigators, and people who are funnier than their situations ought to allow. He likes cities with back alleys and history, but he also likes places that feel a little haunted, whether that means Hollywood, Pasadena, or an island off the coast of Maine. Even when the plots get strange, the people usually feel like people first.

Now he splits his time between South Pasadena, California, and Vinalhaven, Maine, with his wife Dawn and close family nearby. That feels fitting. His work has always had one foot in show business and the other somewhere quieter, stranger, and a little harder to pin down.