RG Belsky Books in Order

R.G. Belsky is from Cleveland, Ohio, studied journalism at Ohio University, and moved to New York City in 1970 after a year in Vietnam. New York, and the strange, hectic world of local news, became the setting he would keep returning to in both journalism and fiction.

He came to fiction through the newsroom.

Before he was known for crime novels, Belsky spent years working the kind of media jobs that usually end up in somebody else's thriller. He worked at small newspapers in New Jersey, then built a long career in New York at the New York Post, Star magazine, the New York Daily News, and NBC News. He has been a metropolitan editor, managing editor, and digital news executive, and he has covered major crime stories, celebrity stories, and political scandals along the way.

That background matters because his novels feel lived-in. The deadlines, the office politics, the newsroom gossip, the bad coffee, the chase for one more source before deadline, all of it comes from someone who really did the job. Belsky has even joked that when people ask where he gets his ideas, the honest answer is that he just went to work every day.

He started writing fiction while still working full time as a journalist, and he has said that reading Raymond Chandler helped push him toward trying crime novels himself. That mix of hard-boiled storytelling and real newsroom experience shows up all over his books. They move fast, they like a sharp twist, and they usually drop readers into a New York story where the truth is messy and nobody comes without baggage.

A lot of readers know him best for the Gil Malloy books, including The Kennedy Connection, The Midnight Hour, Shooting for the Stars, and Blonde Ice. Those novels follow a bruised newspaper reporter trying to claw his way back to the front page, and they lean into cold cases, political secrets, celebrity culture, and the old tabloid instinct that there is always one more layer to the story.

Then came Clare Carlson, the TV news director at the center of Yesterday's News, Below the Fold, The Last Scoop, Beyond the Headlines, and It's News to Me. Clare works in television now, but she still thinks like a street reporter, and that gives the series a nice engine. Readers tend to like the blend of murder mystery, newsroom pressure, and Clare's very imperfect personal life. The first two books in the series also picked up mystery awards, which helped put the series on more readers' radar.

He also writes thrillers under the name Dana Perry, and his earlier suspense novels include Loverboy and Playing Dead. Across all of those books, the pattern is pretty clear: Belsky likes reporters, old secrets, public scandal, and the moment when a supposedly settled story suddenly cracks open again.

He likes the noise.

Belsky lives in New York City, and he has also spoken about spending time in Princeton, New Jersey. Fittingly for a longtime newspaperman, he is known for writing longhand on legal pads and doing real work in coffee shops, surrounded by the kind of bustle most writers try to escape.