About Lowell Cauffiel
LOWELL CAUFFIEL is a producer, screenwriter, a best-selling author and a former investigative reporter who has won many awards, including citations from the Columbia Graduate School for Journalism and the National Magazine Awards.
Cauffiel spent the first fifteen years of his writing career at The Detroit News and Detroit Monthly Magazine, where he became known for his inspiring profiles, in-depth sports stories and penetrating accounts of crime and conflict in the unforgiving streets of the Motor City.
His five nonfiction crime books have been hailed by critics for their detailed research and psychological insights into the minds of killers and the human wreckage they leave in their wakes. His subjects have included a monstrous, homicidal patriarch in the New York Times best-selling House of Secrets; a pair of female serial killers in Forever and Five Days and a calculating criminal justice instructor who tried to design the perfect crime with the murder of his TV anchorwoman wife in Eye of the Beholder. Cauffiel’s first true crime book, Masquerade, the story of a Grosse Pointe psychologist’s deadly double life, was a national best seller.

As a crime novelist Cauffiel has been described as a stylish and compelling storyteller with the tendency to also pepper his fiction with some comic relief. His four crime novels have explored diverse characters and settings that range from a Detroit shakedown crew in Marker to the off-the-field world of the NFL in Toss to the underbelly of the film and television industry in his latest novel Below the Line, his first book since moving to Los Angeles in 2003.
His film work also draws on his crime expertise. He has sold a half dozen pilots to major networks, worked as a script doctor and developed and executive produced the 2018 film Stockholm. It stars Ethan Hawke in the lead role of that dramatizes Swiss bank robbery that hatched the term, “Stockholm syndrome.”
Cauffiel has appeared in more than two dozen documentaries about his books, including appearances on MSNBC, Court TV, A&E and Discovery ID. He’s also written and directed documentaries for Discovery. He has lectured for esteemed Story guru Robert McKee and served as consultant on using the power of story in business.
In 2009 Cauffiel co-founded Primary Purpose Productions, a nonprofit which makes short, compelling films designed to inspire alcoholics and addicts into recovery. An avid motorcyclist and blues and jazz guitarist, he continues to reside in Southern California and often returns to Michigan to nourish his Midwestern roots.