Michael Gruber is an author living in Seattle, Washington

Seattle, Washington

Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

. He attended Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Miami

University of Miami

The University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...

. He worked as a cook, a marine biologist, a speech writer, a policy advisor for the Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...

 White House, and a bureaucrat for the United States Environmental Protection Agency

United States Environmental Protection Agency

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is an agency of the federal government of the United States charged with protecting human health and the environment, by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress...

 (EPA) before becoming a novelist.

He is generally acknowledged to be the ghostwriter

Ghostwriter

A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written...

 of the popular Robert K. Tanenbaum

Robert K. Tanenbaum

Robert K. Tanenbaum is an attorney, author of crime novels, and the creator of a series of novels featuring Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi, lawyers for the New York District Attorney's office....

 series of Butch Karp novels starting with No Lesser Plea and ending with Resolved. After the partnership with Tanenbaum ended, Gruber began publishing his own novels under William Morrow and HarperCollins

HarperCollins

HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

.

Gruber's "Jimmy Paz" trilogy, while critically acclaimed, did not sell at the same levels as the Butch Karp series in the United States. The Book of Air and Shadows became a national bestseller shortly after its release in March 2007, however.

Published works

• Tropic of Night - The detective Jimmy Paz investigates a series of mysteries involving African sorcery in Miami. Themes explored include the nature of race, "magic," and the perceived illusions of reality.

• Valley of Bones - Jimmy Paz becomes intertwined with the life of a nun (Emmylou Dideroff) from a little-known Catholic order who is wrapped up in the Sudan
  Sudan
  Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...
  
  ese civil war. Themes include redemption and the mysteries of faith.

• Night of the Jaguar - Paz investigates a string of murders revolving around a young boy from the Amazon rain forest and a guardian jaguar spirit. Environmental devastation, greed, and the failures of science to explain the unknown are some of the areas explored in the last novel of the Paz trilogy.

• The Witch's Boy - Classical stories are revisited in this fantasy novel, as seen through the eyes of an ugly orphaned boy named Lump who is raised by a witch. Winner of the 2006 Scandiuzzi Children's Book Award for Middle Grades/Young Adults of the Washington State Book Award
  Washington State Book Award
  The Washington State Book Awards are presented annually in recognition of notable books written by Washington authors in the previous year.This literary awards program was established in 1967 as the Governor's Writers Awards. The program was based at the Washington State Library in Olympia...
  
  s.

• The Book of Air and Shadows
  The Book of Air and Shadows
  The Book of Air and Shadows is a thriller novel by Michael Gruber published in 2007.-Plot summary:Set concurrently in the 17th century and the 21st century, the novel is an intriguing and complex thriller based around the mystery of William Shakespeare...
  
  - Letters found in a rare book set off a race to find an undiscovered Shakespeare play. The concept of "intellectual property" and the world of William Shakespeare
  William Shakespeare
  William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
  
   are explored in this intricate thriller.

• Forgery of Venus

• The Good Son (2010)

Ghost-written works for Robert K. Tanenbaum

• 1987 No Lesser Plea
• 1989 Depraved Indifference
• 1991 Immoral Certainty
• 1992 Reversible Error
  Reversible error
  In law, a reversible error is an error by the trier of law or the trier of fact or malfeasance by one of the trying attorneys which results in an unfair trial...
  
  
• 1993 Material Witness
  Material witness
  A material witness is a person with information alleged to be material concerning a criminal proceeding. The authority to detain material witnesses dates to the First Judiciary Act of 1789, but the Bail Reform Act of 1984 most recently amended the text of the statute, and it is now codified at...
  
  
• 1994 Corruption of Blood
• 1994 Justice Denied
  Justice Denied
  Justice Denied is the only regularly published print magazine in the world solely devoted to issues related to wrongful convictions. The magazine prints stories about wrongful convictions, miscarriages of justice, and criminal justice issues related to prosecution and conviction of innocent people...
  
  
• 1996 Falsely Accused
• 1997 Irresistible Impulse
  Irresistible impulse
  In criminal law, irresistible impulse is a defense by excuse, in this case some sort of insanity, in which the defendant argues that they should not be held criminally liable for their actions that broke the law, because they could not control those actions....
  
  
• 1998 Reckless Endangerment
• 1999 Act of Revenge
• 2000 True Justice
  True Justice
  True Justice is a 13 episode television series about undercover cops starring Steven Seagal. Seagal stars as Elijah Kane, and heads a special task force....
  
  
• 2001 Enemy Within
• 2002 Absolute Rage
• 2003 Resolved

External links

• Michael Gruber's Website
• Neurobotics article appearing in Wired Magazine.
• Map the Genome, Hack the Genome. article appearing in Wired Magazine.
• Michael Gruber at HarperCollins
• Interview with author at BookBrowse
• Publisher's Weekly review.
• The case of the missing ghost By Jules Older, San Francisco Magazine.