Bryan Gruley

Bryan Gruley is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Bleak Harbor and the award-winning Starvation Lake trilogy of novels. He is also a lifelong journalist who is proud to have shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the staff of the Wall Street Journal for their coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Gruley's new novel, Purgatory Bay, is set in the same fictional Michigan town as Bleak Harbor.

From the author's Q&A with Andrew DeCanniere at Chicago Splash Magazine:

Andrew DeCanniere: To begin at the beginning, what led you to write Purgatory Bay in the first place?

Bryan Gruley: Sure. First of all, the very first seed of this book came when I woke up in the middle of the night and, for some reason, I had the words to Ophelia by The Band in my head. It goes “Boards on the window, mail by the door. What would anybody leave so quickly for? Ophelia – Where have you gone?” So, that was my first conception of the character, Ophelia, who disappears early on in the book. Then, as I say in the acknowledgements, there was this mass murder I read about when I was a kid in Detroit. I was 10 years old and this family — the Robison family — was in their cottage in northern Michigan, and somebody broke in and just killed them all. They weren’t found for two or three weeks. It was in the paper all the time. A year or two later, my parents bought a cottage up north, not far from where those people were killed, and I used to lay in my bed in our cottage thinking about when this guy is coming to kill all of us. They hadn’t caught the guy, so — it was just some guy up there, right? That stayed with me all of these years, so I grabbed that and...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Bryan Gruley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Starvation Lake.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Tree.

The Page 69 Test: Bleak Harbor.

The Page 69 Test: Purgatory Bay.

--Marshal Zeringue