Nick Vellis

Nick Vellis is a retired law enforcement officer having served as a patrol officer and detective before moving into intelligence and data analysis - first in the private sector, then as a contract analyst with a federal law enforcement agency. That career left him with a hard-earned understanding of how investigations go sideways, how people construct convincing lies, and what it costs the men and women who have to sort it out anyway.

Dig Two Graves: Revenge or Honor, his debut novel, is a historical fiction war thriller drawn from his father’s World War II experiences, the book he had to write before he could write anything else. The Mac Everett mystery series came next - five novels set in present-day Orlando, Florida, where the sun is relentless and the corruption runs deep and nobody finds you until the buzzards circle. The series follows Death in Her Eyes, Follow the Evidence, Familial Similarities, and A Soldier’s Coin to its conclusion in Back to Being Dead. Mac is the kind of PI the genre was built for - careful, cynical, and just stubborn enough to keep going when the smart money says quit. The series was shaped by a lifelong love of Hammett, Chandler, and Parker - and more recently Connelly, Sandford, and James Lee Burke, the writers who convinced him that a good PI novel could carry real weight without slowing down.

Away from the desk, Nick builds military scale models and model railroads, shoots competitively, and reads widely across genres - thrillers and suspense, military history, science fiction, and crime fiction with a preference for noir and the classics. He reads in the tradition he writes - Hammett, Chandler, Parker, Connelly, Sandford, Burke - with military history on the shelf beside them. He writes the books he wants to read, and the next one may surprise you.

Nick lives in Florida and is hard at work on his next project.