Tim O'Mara Books in Order

Tim O'Mara was born in Flushing, Queens, and raised on Long Island, close enough to New York City to feel its pull before he really knew the place. As a young reader he loved mysteries, especially puzzle-driven stories and kid sleuths, and that early taste for sharp dialogue and careful observation never left him.

Long before he published a novel, O'Mara built a life in New York classrooms. He started teaching in the New York City public schools in 1987 and spent decades working in math and special education. A big stretch of that time was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he also served as a middle school dean. Those years gave him a close-up view of students, families, cops, housing projects, and the thousand small dramas that fill a city day.

The classroom came first.

He has said that teaching and detective work are not all that far apart. In both, you ask the right questions, listen hard, and try to figure out what is really going on behind the first story you hear. That idea runs straight through his fiction.

Writing grew out of the job. O'Mara has said the spark for Sacrifice Fly came during a home visit to the Roberto Clemente Houses, when he suddenly saw the opening of a crime novel. He mixed that teacher's-eye view with stories and police know-how from his brother, a longtime sergeant, and created Raymond Donne, a man who understands both school hallways and crime scenes.

Sacrifice Fly introduced readers to Ray as a former NYPD officer turned schoolteacher in Williamsburg. What pulls people into the book is not just the murder case, but the feeling that Ray truly knows the kids he is trying to protect. The novel was nominated for the Barry Award for Best First Novel, and it set the tone for the books that followed: tough, local, funny in spots, and deeply concerned with young people in danger.

In Crooked Numbers and Dead Red, O'Mara widened the canvas. He moves from school corridors and Brooklyn blocks into questions about class, loyalty, race, family, and the way old choices keep echoing. Readers who stick with the series tend to like Ray's voice as much as the plots. He can be stubborn and bruised, but he pays attention, and O'Mara knows how to make New York feel lived in rather than postcard pretty.

Kids in trouble are often the moral center of his stories.

Later books such as Nasty Cutter and The Hook push the danger even closer to Ray's home and school community. O'Mara also wrote shorter crime fiction, including the story The Tip and the novella Smoked, and he edited the anthology Down to the River. That wider work fits him well. Even away from the Raymond Donne novels, he seems drawn to stories about pressure, bad choices, and the ties that keep people connected when everything around them gets messy.

He lives in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen with his wife and daughter and has long been active in the city's reading scene, hosting and co-producing a biweekly prose and poetry series in the East Village. That feels like a natural extension of the fiction. His books are full of voices, rhythm, and neighborhood energy, and they keep coming back to the same question: who shows up when a kid needs help?