Matthew F. Jones was born in Boston and grew up on a horse and dairy farm in rural Upstate NY. He attended Boston University and is a graduate of Hartwick College and a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Syracuse University School of Law. He never studied writing though from his earliest memories viewed himself as a writer (more accurately a storyteller, constantly weaving people he encountered or made up into stories in his head) though rarely sat down and actually put any of the stories to paper. He perhaps never would have become a real writer had he not, while working as a public interest attorney in Syracuse, NY, suffered a severe football related injury that forced him to be more or less stationary for most of a year. In a tiny third floor apartment he shared with his then girlfriend and current wife he started writing his first novel – The Cooter Farm – longhand, on a yellow legal pad, using an army footlocker for a desk. He had no thought of trying to publish it until his future wife one day showed him a letter saying he had received a full scholarship to Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference. Unbeknownst to him, she had submitted a part of the manuscript to the conference.
That summer at Squaw Valley he retained his first literary agent, who sold The Cooter Farm to Hyperion, where it was published to excellent reviews as the company’s first ever work of fiction. (Entertainment Weekly calling it, “An altogether remarkable novel that will remind readers of John Irving one minute, Joyce Carol Oates the next. A truly amazing first novel.”) Since then, he has written almost every day of his life while also serving as a guest writer or writer in residence at various colleges and universities. His novels have been translated into various languages, named on a number of best novels of the year lists and been widely praised by the country’s major reviewers. Three of his novels have been made into major motion pictures, including his own adaptation of his novel A Single Shot (FSG) (“One of the finest novels of rural crime and moral horror in the past few decades”, Daniel Woodrell, from his foreword for the Mulholland Books reissue of the novel as a Crime Classic. “A harrowing literary thriller….a powerful blend of love and violence, of the grotesque and tender,” Christopher Lehman-Haupt, the New York Times. “A violent study of desperation, owing more to Dostoevsky and Faulkner than any suspense writer”, The Library Journal. “A Single Shot is the finest portrait of guilt since Crime and Punishment”, L.A. Times Book Review)
After he was hired to write a screenplay for his novel Boot Tracks (“Brilliantly chilling. A nightmare thriller with the power to haunt”, *Starred Kirkus Review. “I haven’t read something that made me empathize with a bad guy this intensely since I read In Cold Blood in high school”, Katy Haegele, The Philadelphia Inquirer. “An artful novel enlivened by some of the best low-life dialogue this side of Elmore Leonard,” Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post) Matthew moved to L.A. for a time and focused primarily on screenwriting, adapting two of his own novels and writing other film and TV projects for hire and on spec. He is now living in Virginia, focusing again entirely on writing novels, where his true passion lies. Until recently he was still doing part time legal work for indigent and disadvantaged clients.
His other three published novels are, The Elements of Hitting, a ‘sort of’ baseball novel (Hyperion) (“…a haunting and occasionally beautiful story of man’s attempt to rebuild his life with two strikes against him,” Chris Bohjalian, Washington Post Book World): Blind Pursuit, revolving around a child kidnapping (FSG) (“Jones is unpredictable and, therefore, terrifying. His characters are knowable, if changeable and complicated. If you say yes to his use of language (like deciding to read poetry) you will not be able to shake him,” Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times Book Review: ‘Deepwater’ (Bloomsbury) (“Jones and Daniel Woodrell are the leading contemporary authors of country noir, a subgenre whose roots trace back to James M. Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice. Jones builds tension from two seemingly contradictory sources: the noirist’s stock in trade, the disaster waiting to happen, and the crackling unpredictability that comes from the expert melding of genres: noir thriller crossed with psychological horror,” Booklist, *Starred Review)
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Matthew F. Jones’s A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow in the spring of 2026.
