Kirkus Reviews has given a starred review to my new novel, The Return.
“Gruber (The Good Son, 2010, etc.) has a gift for seamlessly combining the visceral with the cerebral, without any degradation of quality on either side of the coin. He will have readers ruminating on ideas of identity, history, mortality, family, fate, and the complex and destructive relationship between Mexico and its neighbor El Norte, all while simultaneously thrilling their pants off, which is a rare and wonderful thing. Like Gruber’s other books, this novel puts the work of other thriller writers to shame and raises the quality bar for the genre to a precipitously high level. Thrilling and compulsively readable.”
A spy novel for the 21st century, by Laura Miller Salon.com
"Adeptly plotted yet philosophical, worldly yet preoccupied with moral truth, it’s a book to provoke comparisons with John le Carré and Graham Greene, while at the same time eluding the ideological constraints that weigh so heavy on those masters."
Book Review: The Good Son by Michael Gruber by Alan Cheuse, Dallas News National Public Radio
"We all thought the American Taliban story was a good one when we first read about the privileged kid from Northern California who joined the terrorist army in Afghanistan. Michael Gruber's riveting new novel, The Good Son, gives this tale a new and engaging twist by presenting us with a Taliban American."
Gaudy Night: The Art and Pull of Mysteries and Thrillers
I participated in a wonderful panel for the Kindlings Muse podcast. Listen to the entire show by clicking the play button in the upper right of the link.
A pretty long feature about my writing career that came out around the publication of The Book of Air and Shadows in Seattle Met Magazine on the subjects of ghostwriting and being an "invisible" author. This feature discusses at length my ghostwriting work with Robert K. Tanenbaum and the Butch Karp series of novels.
Michael Gruber | The Ghost Who Came Out of the Shadows
A short Q&A I did for Seattle Times several years ago.