Copyright 2006-2021 by Joe Sharkey
Joe Sharkey’s work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years, until 2015, he was a columnist for the New York Times — for 16 years writing the weekly “On the Road” column on business travel, and before that the weekly “Jersey” column for three years.
A Vietnam veteran, he has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel. One of his nonfiction books, “Above Suspicion” (originally published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster), has been adapted as a major motion picture starring Emilia Clarke, Jack Huston, Thora Birch and Johnny Knoxville (and directed by Phillip Noyce), and was released in 2021. (The planned earlier theatrical release of the movie in the United States was postponed due to the COVID 19 shutdowns of movie theaters).
In January 2017, a new, updated edition of “Above Suspicion” was published in print and as an e-book by Open Road Media. Penguin Random House also released an audio book version in January. Open Road also published revised editions in e-book format of his true-crime books “Death Sentence” and “Deadly Greed.” In January 2018, the revised edition of “Death Sentence” was published in print by Open Road Media.
In his newspaper career before the New York Times, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal; the executive city editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union; and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, while on assignment, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 at 37,000 feet over the Amazon in Brazil. All 154 on the commercial airliner died. His reports on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London Magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson — where he is also working on a new novel, “Action News,” a murder mystery set behind the scenes in the dramatically changing local television world of 1970s Philadelphia. He is also finishing a nonfiction book, “Wreckage,” part true-crime and part memoir, about the priest-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the pitiful life of one of its victims, a homeless altar boy with a rap sheet as long as a bishop’s stole, a now-incarcerated man who descended into street crime and murder in the years after he was abused by a priest.
Joe Sharkey 
Just watched Above Suspicion. Excellent movie. Very well done! Thank you for writing such a compelling true story! Also enjoyed the updated epilogue about the story!