Bryan Gruley

Bryan Gruley is the critically acclaimed author of Starvation Lake: A Mystery, and the sequel, The Hanging Tree. His third book, The Skeleton Box, is scheduled to be published in 2012.

Now in its eleventh printing, Starvation Lake was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America, and won the Anthony, Barry, and Strand awards. The Hanging Tree was named a Michigan Notable Book for 2011 and a Kirkus Reviews Best Mystery of 2010, and has been nominated for a Barry Award for best paperback original. Reviewers have compared Bryan to novelist Dennis Lehane.

Secretly, though, Bryan would love to be compared favorably to Detroit Red Wings stars Johan Franzen and Pavel Datsyuk. He’s been playing hockey since he was a boy growing up in Detroit, and still plays regularly at Johnny’s Ice House in Chicago.

Hockey plays a big role in the life of the fictional town of Starvation Lake, as do two of Bryan’s other passions, northern Michigan and newspapers.

He and his two brothers and three sisters have spent many weekends at their parents’ cottage on Big Twin Lake in northern lower Michigan—not far from the real Starvation Lake. Bryan had his first newspaper job at the nearby Antrim County News in the summer of 1978.

After graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 1979, Bryan worked for newspapers in Brighton, Howell, Kalamazoo and Detroit, Michigan, before joining The Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau in 1995. He became Chicago Bureau Chief of the Journal in 2005 and this fall joined Bloomberg News in Chicago as a reporter-at-large writing features for Bloomberg Businessweek.

He was won numerous awards for his writing and reporting. He wrote one of the front-page stories about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that won the Journal a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. “War Stories,” his November 25, 2003, tale about a black World War II lieutenant who saved a young Holocaust victim, was an alternate finalist in the Pulitzer feature writing category.

Bryan is the author of a prize-winning non-fiction book, Paper Losses: A Modern Epic of Greed and Betrayal at America’s Two Largest Newspaper Companies. (Grove Atlantic, 1993) He’s also an amateur musician who sings, plays guitar, and composes his own songs. They include For A Son, which he wrote after the 2002 death of his friend and Journal colleague, Danny Pearl.

Bryan lives on the city’s north side with his wife, Pam. They have three grown children, Joel, Kaitlin and Danielle.