Con Lehane books

42nd Street Library Mystery Reading Order

Brian McNulty Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Con Lehane is a mystery writer whose work is rooted in the bars, libraries, and working-class neighborhoods of New York City. He grew up in the New York suburbs, earned his MFA in fiction from Columbia University, and spent years bartending at two dozen or so establishments before turning to writing full-time. That hands-on experience gave his debut novel, Beware the Solitary Drinker, its realistic feel – the book took nearly ten years to write and drew praise for blending mystery, literary fiction, and social criticism.

Lehane’s first series follows Brian McNulty, a bartender on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who gets pulled into murder investigations through the people he meets behind the bar. He later created the 42nd Street Library Mystery series, which centers on Raymond Ambler, curator of a fictional crime fiction collection at the New York Public Library’s landmark 42nd Street branch. In 2025, Lehane published The Red Scare Murders, a standalone hardboiled PI novel set in 1950s Hell’s Kitchen during the McCarthy era. He currently lives near Washington, D.C. and teaches writing at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.