Mobile native Thomas Lakeman has built a writing career that runs from hard-boiled FBI thrillers to the stage of the Playhouse in the Park. He is the author of three mystery novels published by St. Martin’s Minotaur — The Shadow Catchers (2006), Chillwater Cove (2007) and Broken Wing (2009) — a continuing series following a pair of FBI special agents, Mike Yeager and Peggy Weaver.
The Shadow Catchers sends Agent Yeager into the Nevada desert on the trail of a serial killer. In Chillwater Cove, Agent Weaver returns to her Tennessee hometown to search for a missing childhood friend. Broken Wing puts Yeager back at the center of the story with an undercover assignment infiltrating the Mafia in post-Katrina New Orleans. The books have drawn critical praise from several major national publications.
From Hollywood Marketing to the Stage
Lakeman’s path to fiction ran through the film industry. During the 1990s he worked in the marketing department of Universal Pictures and was a founding partner of Digital Planet, a Southern California web design firm later acquired by iXL Inc. As the company’s creative director, he produced some of the web’s first movie promotional campaigns, including sites for Twelve Monkeys and Apollo 13, and co-created the animated web series Madeleine’s Mind.
His screenwriting includes the independent feature Triptych, produced by Tea Tree Films, and he has written numerous stage plays produced by Mobile’s own Playhouse in the Park. He has served as Tennessee Williams playwright-in-residence at the University of the South.