Dan Lawton
Dan Lawton is an award-winning literary suspense, mystery, and thriller author from New Hampshire. He is an active member of the International Thriller Writers (ITW) Organization.
His ninth novel, The Both of Us, won the 2025 Maxy Award for Best Thriller. His fifth novel, The Green House, won the 2021 New Hampshire Writers’ Project Literary Award for Fiction, was a Bronze Medalist in Adult Fiction for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY Awards), a Finalist for the 2021 Montaigne Medal (Eric Hoffer Awards) for most thought-provoking book, a Finalist in Fiction for the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, a Finalist in Mystery for the 2020 Book Excellence Awards, and a Finalist in Literary Fiction for the 2020 American Fiction Awards. His fourth novel, Plum Springs, won the 2019 New Hampshire Writers’ Project Readers’ Choice Award for Fiction.
Books
Plum Springs
Nine-year-old Rusty Travis and his older brother Bo can’t take it anymore. The manual labor forced upon them has worn them thin and callused their hands. Water is rationed and the heat is slowly killing them. They miss their mom.
She lives on the same lot as them but in a different trailer, separated by a single plum tree. They’re not allowed to see her. And now that their dad has gone after their baby sister, Ruby, it’s up to them to do what’s needed for survival.
Desperate to change their fates, Rusty and Bo run away into the forest. They stay nearby and closely watch their dad’s trailer. When the time is right, they’ll risk it all to save themselves and their sister.
But the town of Plum Springs, Kentucky, and its secrets won’t make it easy. All the boys need is for someone to show them mercy. They’re just boys.
In these parts, family ties and twisted loyalty runs deep …
… maybe too deep.
Winner of the 2019 New Hampshire Writers’ Project Readers’ Choice Awards for Fiction
Taken: A Mother's Secret
Nine-year-old Chloe Janis is missing.
Abby, her mom, is now faced with an impossible decision—revealing seventeen-year-old secrets she’s kept hidden, or losing her daughter forever.
Everything unravels after Abby receives a cryptic message from a man from her past, someone she’d tried to erase from her memory. But now, he’s back. And he’s done the unthinkable.
As the police being investigating Chloe’s disappearance, Abby tries to suppress the truth that threatens to reveal her years of deception and expose the ultimate betrayal.
How far will Abby go to protect her secret and bring her daughter home before it’s too late?
The answer is anything but simple …
Previously published as Amber Alert by Solstice Publishing.
The Both of Us
The thing about the truth is, sometimes, it’s all in the eyes.
On his drive home from work, Mark hears a familiar voice on the Doctor Lisa radio show—a popular therapist hotline. It’s not just a familiar voice; it’s her voice. His wife Rachel’s voice.
The caller, who goes by Mindy from Indy, has a secret. A secret so explosive it’ll destroy her life if it comes out—but she hangs up before revealing it. Later, Rachel denies ever having heard of the Doctor Lisa Show, or Mindy from Indy.
But Mark knows his wife, and he knows her voice. And he doesn’t understand why she’s lying to him, or what about.
As Mark searches for the truth behind the mysterious caller’s identity, he discovers it’s family secrets that often cut the deepest. Somebody with a deep obsession is playing dangerous mind games—threatening not only his trust in Rachel, but also the safety of their two daughters—and might be willing to go further than he could ever imagine.
When he looks closely, he learns the eyes really do tell all. That is, unless he can’t trust what his eyes are trying to tell him.
The Green House
The green house is more than a greenhouse.
Seven flowers, seven colors, seven meanings, and one 37-year-old secret—the green house is the keeper of it all. Its creator, Girard Remington, is a fragile elderly man whose life was shattered by a tragedy nearly four decades ago. And when tragedy strikes again—this time to his beloved wife, Miriam—he struggles to cope.
The pain of the two interwoven tragedies drives Girard to places of his psyche he desperately tries but is unable to escape. As the only place that offers him solace and tranquility, he turns to the green house as his savior from the regret and the agony and the heartache—and with it, he discovers the power behind it not even he knew existed. And if he listens closely enough, he may be offered the greatest miracle of all—hope for a second chance.
That Was Before
An hour after Randolph Spiers quits his job as a mechanical engineer, he finally approaches the woman he’s eyed at the supermarket, only to watch it explode minutes later with her trapped inside. The old Randolph would have gone home to his adulterous wife and forgot about it.
That Was Before.
The new Randolph tracks down the woman and drives her cross-country without a plan or Midwestern destination in mind. Even with his old life in shambles, that may be the least of his problems. The enigmatic woman next to him is running from her past too, and as trouble closes in and the truth behind the explosion is revealed, he’s forced to question everything he thought he ever knew and felt-and everyone.
Now he must decide whose side he’s on. And he doesn’t know who to trust.
Stolen Mercy
Everyone has secrets. Some secrets are worth killing for.
In Stoneham, Massachusetts, not far from Boston, Marco and his friend Antonio are after a mysterious artifact hidden somewhere inside a Victorian house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The house has new owners, so getting their hands on the artifact is more challenging than they bargained for—and more dangerous. The artifact itself holds secrets Marco and Antonio don’t even know about, and to make matters worse, they’re not the only ones after it.
Meanwhile, Marco’s pizzeria-owning uncle dials up the pressure to retrieve the artifact. And he’s not the only one breathing down their necks. An attorney with a payment deadline lingers over their heads and a ruthless group of criminals with mob-like supremacy conspires against them in a race against time.
All of which leads Marco to wonder: What’s so special about the artifact and why does everyone want it?
And what happens if he doesn’t find it first? Or worse, if he does?
Previously published as Operation Salazar by Dan Lawton.