Robert Ellis Books in Order

If you want the Lena Gamble trilogy from the beginning: City of Fire → The Lost Witness → Murder Season
If you want the Matt Jones books in order: City of Echoes → The Love Killings → The Girl Buried in the Woods → City of Stones
If you want a political thriller: Access to Power
If you want a dark standalone crime novel: The Dead Room

Robert Ellis was born in Philadelphia and raised in southeastern Pennsylvania, not far from the city. As a kid and teenager, he was pulled toward the arts from a lot of directions at once, music, movies, books, and the strange theater of real-life crime. He played guitar in garage bands and later managed the kitchen at The Main Point in Bryn Mawr, where he crossed paths with jazz and blues musicians.

Crime got under his skin early.

Ellis has said that hearing about a murdered teenage girl found near his home stayed with him for years. Around the same time, he was devouring Hitchcock, Conan Doyle, John Buchan, and Dashiell Hammett. He skipped classes to sit through murder trials, then turned what he saw into stories for school and the newspaper.

He had already spent years studying film when his plans changed after a terrible crash with a tractor trailer at twenty-four. While recovering, he worked with Walter Tevis and turned seriously toward writing. That brush with mortality seems to sit behind a lot of his fiction, the sense that danger can arrive fast and alter everything.

Before novels took over, Ellis worked in film, television, advertising, and political media. He wrote and co-produced The Great Lake States for National Geographic, won a regional Emmy for work with CBS News in Philadelphia, and later moved to Los Angeles. One political surveillance job became the spark for Access to Power, his first published novel, a Washington thriller about media, ambition, and murder.

Then came the crime novels that really fixed his world on the page.

The Dead Room brought him back to Philadelphia for a dark serial killer story, this time with a young attorney, Teddy Mack, caught in a corrupt system. With City of Fire, The Lost Witness, and Murder Season, he shifted to Los Angeles and created Lena Gamble, a homicide detective who is tough, rattled, smart, and very human. Readers who like Ellis usually point to the same things, fast plots, big reversals, city politics, and characters who feel vulnerable even when they carry a badge.

He later launched the Matt Jones books with City of Echoes, followed by The Love Killings, The Girl Buried in the Woods, and City of Stones. These novels keep his favorite ingredients in play, pressure inside police departments, corruption near the top, personal grief that never stays personal for long, and cities that feel alive block by block. Los Angeles shows up again and again, not just as backdrop, but as heat, traffic, smoke, money, noise, and danger.

That old childhood shock came back most directly in The Girl Buried in the Woods, which draws on the image that stayed with him since he was ten. It is a good example of what Ellis does best, take a brutal crime, then widen the story into something about memory, power, and the cost of looking too closely.

Ellis has also said he loves research, and it shows. He has spent time with detectives, forensic specialists, morgues, prisons, and real locations so the machinery of his stories feels grounded. He now lives and writes in Connecticut, and still talks warmly about books, music, cooking, and walks by the water.