T.J. Brearton's Blog
November 9, 2025
NEW RELEASE! The Body Collector (Manna City Book 1)
Out in the Perimeter, no one cares if you die...
Manna City is a climate-controlled utopia for the elite, enclosed in a massive wall. But when an unknown female is found dead in the shantytown outside full of desperate people hoping to get in, the local Body Collector takes an interest.
His usual job is to burn unclaimed dead to earn a meager wage. However, the victim bears the strange markings of the Olduvai survivalists who manage to live in the surrounding wasteland by cultivating dala, a medicinal plant with hallucinogenic properties.
The Olduvai want to know what happened to one of their own, and they’ll pay the Body Collector in supplies — maybe dala — so he can leave this place for good.
Unless, of course, her trail points him to what lies on the other side of the wall, and a truth about the world that can change everything.
Mad Max meets Dune in this post-apocalyptic survival adventure that’s OUT NOW!
Learn more
September 27, 2024
"Which one of your novels should I start with?"
Meeting new readers is great. Someone realizes I write mysteries and goes, “Oh! I love to read! Let me try one of yours!” And then the next thing they ask is almost always one of these two questions: “What’s your biggest seller?” Or “What’s your favorite?”
I get asked so much, I decided to come up with a list for each.
And while coming up with the best sellers was fairly easy, the second question was harder. Really, if my life depended on it (my kids are always trying to get me to make some hard choice ‘as if my life depended on it’), what would my favorites be?
And as I chose them, I knew it was true.
First, the best sellers, in ascending order. I’ve taken into account both initial sales and overall sales.
5. DARK WEB — An early book that had a rocky start but grew by word of mouth and a good publisher pushing ads. A teenage boy is found dead on a snowy road. Detective John Swift must untangle a web of real and virtual crimes in order to get to solve the murder. One of the North Country Novels.
4. HER HUSBAND’S LIES — A recent psychological thriller. Callie’s husband is in a coma after his truck plunged into an icy lake. Police have ruled it an accident, but Callie always wondered.
3. HABIT — My debut crime thriller, it sold well but also at one point was the number one free book in the United States on Amazon.
Brendan Healy had it all. At the start of a bright career in neuroscience, a loving wife, their child. Now Brendan is alone, a cop, pursued by his demons as he embarks on his first big case.
2. HER PERFECT SECRET — Another recent psych thriller and my best seller of the past five years, winner of Best Suspense at the Next Generation Indie Awards.
Therapist Emily Lindman thinks her daughter’s fiance might be a former patient… one with a highly troubled and bloody past…
1. GONE — A police procedural mixed with psychological thriller that sold 75,000 copies in its first month in 2016. This was the book that allowed me to quit my “day job.”
A family is missing. They have two small children. When Detective Rondeau views one of their home videos, he sees someone in the shadows, watching the family. But can Rondeau trust his own mind given his harrowing past?
And now, my favorites. Subject to change, maybe, but right now, yeah, this is it.
5. DEAD OR ALIVE — I love the third book in the Tom Lange series because I really felt like I was hitting my stride. Tom was clearer to me than ever, and I was deep into the southern Florida swampland. There’s a scene where Tom confronts a witness and elicits information in a way I’ve never seen in another book before or since.
And airboat rides through the Everglades chasing bad guys — who doesn’t love that??
4. NOWHERE TO HIDE — Sometimes the best premises are the simplest. A cop (FBI agent Shannon Ames) gets stuck in a small town during a blizzard at the same time two maniacs go on a killing spree. The result is pure action and the love I’d come to feel for my main character, Shannon. Shannon kicks absolute ass in this one and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
3. HER PERFECT SECRET — The only book on both lists! I started writing psychological thrillers later in my career, but in many ways this feels like a cop thriller — the main character has a burning need to find out whether her daughter is dating a former patient of hers and undertakes a secret investigation. There’s an energy to this story I had in the writing of it, almost like I got the whole thing all at once. A rare occurrence, indeed.
2. HIDE AND SEEK — is another Shannon Ames thriller, the second book in the series. Maybe I was still getting to know my heroine a little bit, but she was getting to know the job, too. I love the plot here, and I loved coming up with it with the help of the publishers, Brian and Garret. Everything about this one feels right to me — the pacing, the motives, the banter between Shannon and her partner Charlie (who has a secret crush on her). And there’s one moment in particular that has never left me: I can still see Shannon standing there, grass burning from a recent explosion, police lights sweeping over the scene while she talks somberly with a local sheriff about the life of a cop, the things they see that can never be unseen, the things they carry with them.
1. ROUGH COUNTRY — So this is it. My favorite book is the only one that features detective Reed Raleigh. Maybe, honestly, that’s part of why it’s my favorite. Speaking of carrying it with you, Reed is a war vet with PTSD. He likes his curly hair a bit long, wears a beard, and sometimes puts in ear buds while he works. I love this case, too — simple, but it gets dark and unwieldy as Reed peels away the layers, visits crime scene after crime scene. And I love the ending of this one. It goes a little against type (something my publishers typically warn me not to do) and feels real, fresh, and not like every other story of the genre. That’s what this is to me. Purely mine. Purely Reed’s. Purely yours to discover and enjoy.
August 10, 2024
Coming this November!
Mack Banner hasn’t made a movie in fifteen years. He’s been laying low, raising his daughter, hoping not to be recognized.
When a hot young screenwriter writes a script for him to star in, he’s drawn out of hiding to a remote island off the coast of Maine where part of the film will shoot.
Only, the screenwriter, on location for some last-minute rewrites, is suddenly missing. And as the crew spreads out to search for her, a storm brews on the horizon.
Soon they’ll be trapped, and people are starting to turn up dead...
Part Agatha Christie, part action thriller, DEADLY SHOOT by bestseller TJ Brearton will have you on the edge of your seat figuring out “who done it” as Mack races to keep his friends and loved ones safe and to stop a brutal killer before it’s too late.
pre-order today!April 25, 2024
NOW OUT FOR PRE-ORDER
JULIE THOUGHT HE WAS THE MAN OF HER DREAMS.
I walk into my bedroom. There’s a woman in my bed. Next to my fiancé. He promises her he has no idea who I am. That he’s never seen me before. He’s calling me a stalker.
But before I even know how to respond, someone’s breaking down the front door. Pounding up the stairs. I run, but I can’t hide.
Now I’m trapped in a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the midst of a blizzard with a man who swears he doesn’t know me. As though the last five years together never happened.
He’s lying.
And then he looks me right in the eye and whispers so our kidnappers can’t hear him:
‘I’m sorry.’
HER PERFECT FIANCÉ IS TURNING HER LIFE INTO A PERFECT NIGHTMARE.
March 11, 2024
Massive Savings on Thriller AudioBook!
Folks, the publisher just dropped this onto my desk: 60% off one of my latest books on audio, THE DARK IS ALWAYS WAITING.
Don’t miss the book thriller writer Lisa Regan called “Smart, surprising, fast-paced.”
Get it for 60% off today!
February 20, 2024
January 29, 2024
NOW AN AUDIO BOOK
THE DARK IS ALWAYS WAITING is now an audio book from Recorded Books!
Click the button for retailer options, to listen to a sample, and more!
Learn more
December 1, 2023
October 14, 2023
OUT NOW: VENGEANCE
They took everything from him. Now he’s out for justice, no matter the cost. get it on amazon An instant bestseller!
get your copy
September 29, 2023
My Secret Life Writing Nonfiction
I live a secret, parallel life. In it, I write nonfiction.
In my everyday life, the one people see, I am a crime fiction author. But when no one is around and I’m alone in my office, I crack open a Mac Pages document and write about real things.
Some of this has made it online. First Tumblr, now Medium — I post without promotion or fanfare. Perhaps it’s like “Good Will Hunting,” with Will solving math problems and then escaping before anyone sees him. Why, Will? Because, secretly, he wants to be a mathematician.
But these articles — from politics to philosophy to environmentalism — all tell a larger story. I’ve been telling some version of it since I was young.
Around age 19, I was living in Fleetwood, NY. I remember crossing the street to my apartment building, to that glass-door entrance flanked by pin oaks, when it hit me: I would write a book called The Meaning of Life. This is of course a terrible title and a seemingly pretentious thing to think — but rather than profess the actual meaning of everything, the book would draw from all sorts of disciplines, and synthesize them.
Everything goes together. The world religions express similar themes, scripture can reveal philosophy and science, quantum physics is faith-like in its depictions. Electrons once in contact remain in contact no matter the time and space which separate them? Everything in existence emerges from and returns to a “field” that surrounds and binds us all? Upon death, the illusion of time collapses so that we’re now everywhere and everywhen??? Magical!
“God’s will” seems a lot like fate, or determinism, yet the concept of free will undergirds criminal justice, capitalism, even industrial animal agriculture. Agriculture turned animistic religiosity into polytheistic and later monotheistic religiosity because we invented gods to protect our animals and crops.
Time is not linear. Big business and governments are hardly extricable. People are terrified of a “one-world government” yet oblige an overarching system of global consumer capitalism. We’re consuming ourselves into runaway inflation and planetary collapse and conjuring a culture war through unhealthy social network interactions while at the same time living in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
You could say it all started when I discovered The Book by Alan Watts. But since I was asking my friends if they believe in God as early as first grade, it probably began long before that.
(Other favorite and influential works include Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari, Embracing Mind by B. Alan Wallace, How to Do the Work by Nicole LePera, Hate, Inc. by Matt Taibbi, The Field, by Lynne McTaggart, Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.)
As a recovering addict and consummate quitter of things (beginning fourteen years ago, I quit drugs and alcohol, then nicotine, then Facebook) I have 48 years of life experience to draw from. I raised my son (now 19 himself) as a single parent until he was five, when I met my wife, a mental health therapist who is my best friend and love of my life. We have two spectacular daughters together.
But this is about being a closeted nonfiction writer. This is about feeling that it’s time to step into the light and begin sharing may “other side” with you — even if it risks upsetting the apple cart (because politics and philosophy and environmentalism can all do that).
I’m not sure if this is the best thing, to begin posting links to my nonfiction here, to start acknowledging it in my newsletter, but, heck. You only live once. (Probably.)
As a writer, I don’t have a supervisor. Or coworkers. It’s mostly just me. Some days are spent feeling aimless and torn. I search my soul for the right thing to do next, the most authentic. Hopefully this is that.
Hopefully my nonfiction is useful to people. I have this nagging impulse to save the world. It may not be possible, but if I can nudge things in that direction, the effort is worth it.
I believe the key to this salvation includes looking inward at our own often unprocessed trauma and shame — unseen drivers of our daily actions. Because when we understand the influences on our ideologies, we can begin to appreciate the similarities, rather than the differences, among our most cherished beliefs.
Here are some of my latest, most popular articles on Medium:
Well? Tell me what you think. I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or get in touch THIS WAY.
