Leighton Gage is a renowned American novelist, well-known for his mystery, suspense, and thriller books. He is particularly recognized for his police procedural novels, as shown in the Mario Silva series. Gage has lived in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Argentina, Germany, Australia, and Brazil, where he currently resides. The Mario Silva series covers issues that are prevalent in Brazil but do not exist in the United States.
Gage was born in Rahway, New Jersey, on May 13, 1942, and started his writing career in 2008 with the release of his debut book, Blood of the Wicked. His immersion into Brazilian culture after living for more than 20 years in Sao Paulo played a significant role in developing the novel series. In his books, Gage frequently includes the problems that existed in Brazil at that time, which were considered foreign to the American culture. Before his literary career, Gage worked as a creative designer at the international level in a major advertising agency with branches all over the world. He won more than 120 awards for excellence in advertising and even served as a jury of the Lions Festival held in Cannes.
Gage's Chief Inspector Mario Silva series is set in Brazil, and he and his Brazilian-born wife divide their time between their home in Brazil and those of their children and grandchildren in Europe and the U.S. The Silva investigations have all the step-by-step excitement of a world-class procedural series, with each book offering a bit of adventure-travel, with Silva and crew often feeling like tourists within their own country. The series has been praised by several publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Booklist, Library Journal, Kirkus, and a variety of other publications. The reader never knows what the detective might or might not do in order to balance the scales of justice, making Silva an enigma and the series' greatest appeal.