An American novelist who was one of the influential names in the late 1970s–early 1990s American horror literature boom. By 1991, he had 3 New York Times bestsellers (The Wolf's Hour, Stinger and Swan Song) and around 5 million books in print. Since 2002, he has written several books in a historical mystery series featuring a 17th-century magistrate’s clerk, Matthew Corbett, as he unravels mysteries in colonial America.