Thomas Kies Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Random Road → Darkness Lane → Graveyard Bay
If you want the full Geneva Chase arc: Random Road → Darkness Lane → Graveyard Bay → Shadow Hill → Whisper Room
If you like reporter-driven crime fiction: Random Road → Darkness Lane
If you want a later entry point: Shadow Hill → Whisper Room

Thomas Kies grew up off and on with his grandparents in a small house by Waneta Lake, in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. He has said that the place felt half ordinary, half haunted: summer tourists came for swimming and boating, then the cold months left the shoreline quiet enough for a kid's imagination to run wild. He and his younger sister Bonnie turned the empty lakefront into a stage for invented adventures, from pirate hunts to murder cases.

That little cottage gave him two things that would stay with him, atmosphere and books.

Kies remembers mist rising off the water, coyotes at night, and lake ice making strange sounds in winter. Inside, his grandparents kept shelves full of writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Mark Twain. They also took newspapers and magazines seriously, especially the Elmira Star-Gazette, the paper Kies would later work for. He made his first stab at fiction on an old Remington typewriter and liked switching to the red half of the ribbon whenever he typed the words blood or bloody.

Before he got into publishing, he did the kind of jobs that leave a person plenty of time to daydream. He worked on local farms and in vineyards, milking cows, herding cattle, and cleaning stalls. He has said that during the boring stretches, plowing fields or cutting lawns, he made up whole stories in his head. A James Bond double feature sealed the deal, and soon he was spending what money he had on Ian Fleming paperbacks and even trying, unsuccessfully, to make a homemade Bond movie with a friend's Super 8 camera.

He eventually went into newspapers, starting at the Elmira Star-Gazette in the 1970s, and spent most of his adult life working for newspapers and magazines in New England and New York. That career gave him a close look at the kinds of worlds that later show up in his fiction: police stations, courtrooms, political back rooms, fancy Connecticut homes, restaurant kitchens, Broadway theaters, and people who are not nearly as respectable as they first appear. He sold a short story in the 1980s, long before his first novel, and he has told the story with a grin, his father had to buy the magazine in an adult bookstore.

His fiction career took longer to arrive, but when it did, it came with a character who fit his background perfectly. Random Road, published in 2017, introduced Geneva Chase, a sharp, messy Connecticut crime reporter trying to outrun bad choices and a drinking problem while chasing a major story. Kies followed it with Darkness Lane, Graveyard Bay, Shadow Hill, and Whisper Room. Readers who stick with the series tend to like the mix of newsroom hustle, rich-people corruption, and a lead who can be funny, reckless, and painfully human all at once.

Shadow Hill brought him one of his biggest milestones, a 2022 nomination for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award.

Fiction was never a late-life whim for him. It had been there since childhood.

By the time the novels arrived, Kies had spent years gathering the raw material. He has spoken about how journalism put him in rooms with cops, politicians, artists, celebrities, and criminals, and that range shows up across the Geneva Chase books. For years he lived and wrote on Bogue Banks, a barrier island off the North Carolina coast, with his wife, Cindy, and he also served as president of the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce before retiring from that role in 2023. He has three grown children and two grandsons. It is a good setup for a mystery writer: a long memory, a reporter's eye, and a habit of noticing the odd thing in the room.