Kevin Egan graduated with a B.A. in English from Cornell University, where he studied creative writing under Dan McCall (Jack the Bear) and Robert Morgan (Gap Creek). He is the author of seven novels and over twenty short stories.
His first novel, The Perseus Breed (1988), combined a science fiction story-line with strong mystery genre elements. In the book, Borley Share’s obsessive quest to understand a woman’s disappearance uncovers the existence of an alien race using the Earth as a nursery to raise its young.
Writing as Conor Daly, he published a three-book mystery series featuring Kieran Lenahan, who quit the practice of law to become a golf pro. Bouncing between the professional tour and a sedate country club, Kieran cannot shake the problems that bedeviled his legal career. In Local Knowledge (1995), a dead client’s testamentary request that Kieran auction a set of rare German golf clubs enmeshes him in a murderous conspiracy with roots in World War II. In Buried Lies (1996), Kieran is falsely accused of torching his own pro shop on the same day that his long-time caddie falls in front of a train. Only Kieran believes that the two events are connected. In Outside Agency (1997), Kieran wakes up in a strange apartment next to a woman who happens to be dead. He has no memory of who she is or how he got there, but needs to find out fast to save his own neck.
Writing as K.J. Egan, he published Where It Lies (2009), which features Jenny Chase, a single mom and country club pro. This book opens with the apparent suicide of a greenskeeper, who is survived by his wife and autistic teenage son. When the greenskeeper’s life insurer disclaims its million dollar policy based on a suicide clause, Jenny sets out to prove that the death was murder. Along the way, she uncovers even more horrible secrets.
Kevin’s interest in golf – both as a sport and as a subject for fiction – stems from the college summers he spent working at a golf course. Though none of his four golf novels require any special knowledge to read and enjoy, he drew upon memories from those summers to create realistic settings and contextual detail. In 1996, with many golf novels appearing in bookstores, the Booklist review of Buried Lies opined: “Good golf scenes and a believable mystery make this second Kieran Lenahan novel the best golfing mystery on the market.”
With the publication of Midnight (2013) and a series of short stories that have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Kevin moved off the golf course and into another familiar setting, the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Midnight, a Kirkus Best Book of 2013, is a noir-ish thriller based on a simple premise: when a judge dies, his staff keep their jobs until the end of that calendar year. So when Judge Alvin Canter quietly expires in his chambers on the morning of New Year’s Eve, his clerk and secretary face unemployment by close of business. Neither can afford to lose their job, so together they concoct a deceptively simple plan – smuggle Judge Canter’s body out of the courthouse to make it look like he died at home and after the critical hour of midnight. The plan seems to work – until it doesn’t. And so begin three days of increasingly complicated problems and rapidly accelerating danger.
In The Missing Piece (2015), the disputed ownership of a fabulous hoard of ancient Roman silver ends up as the subject of a trial in the New York County Courthouse . The ill-fated first trial ends with a courtroom invasion, the shooting of a court officer, and the theft of an urn worth $5 million. Three years later, the parties re-assemble for the re-trial. The judge, Linda Conover, is secretly pregnant but determined to handle the trial before moving on to the next phase of her life. The paralyzed Gary Martin, convinced that the missing piece never left the courthouse, directs fellow officer Mike McQueen on a literal treasure hunt though the iconic building. Meanwhile, the gunmen are circling with an even more daring plan to disrupt the trial.
Kevin’s short fiction has appeared regularly in Rosebud, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and The Westchester Review. His short stories also have appeared in Whispers, Fiction Quarterly, Dan River Anthology, and the Small Crimes and Fedora III mystery anthologies.