Joe Sharkey

Another of Sharkey's books is Above Suspicion, the story of FBI agent Mark Putnam, who murdered his mistress in an eastern Kentucky mining town. In Suspicion, Sharkey implicitly condemned the FBI for encouraging the use of paid informants. A movie adaptation of Above Suspicion, starring Emilia Clarke and Jack Huston and directed by Phillip Noyce, was released in 2019. His book Deadly Greed, which has been optioned for a feature film, explored the sensational 1989 Boston killing, in which Charles Stuart fatally shot his pregnant wife Carol and caused racial tensions by accusing a black man of the crime.

In 2008, Sharkey was sued before a Brazilian court for an article in The New York Times. The widow of one of the victims claimed the article (in which Sharkey blamed the crash on incapable air operators) defamed the Brazilian people and consequently her personal dignity.

Joe Sharkey was one of seven people aboard an Embraer Legacy business jet that collided in mid-air with a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 over Brazil, on September 29, 2006. The business jet, despite sustaining damage to its wing and tail, managed to land safely at Cachimbo military airport, while the Boeing crashed to the ground, killing all 154 people on board. The Legacy jet was owned and operated by ExcelAire, a charter company headquartered in Ronkonkoma, New York, and was on its delivery flight from Embraer's factory in São José dos Campos, near São Paulo, to the United States. Sharkey was on a freelance assignment in Brazil for Business Jet Traveler, a magazine specialized in corporate aviation. In a New York Times front-page article titled "Colliding With Death at 37,000 Feet, and Living", published October 3, 2006, Sharkey reported:

During an interview with NBC's Today Show on October 5, 2006, Sharkey said he was relaxing in his cabin seat with the window shade down when he was jolted by a bang. "It was more like a car that hits a pothole rather than 'boom!'" he said. The plane steadied itself and it became serenely silent again. It was only when Sharkey opened the shade and looked out his window that he noticed something was dreadfully amiss. "My heart just sank because I looked at the wing tip and I saw that it was shorn off,” he told Today host Matt Lauer. "Basically four feet of the wingtip, the part that curves up, the winglet, gone... I’ve flown a lot, and I’m thinking, 'This is definitely, definitely not good.'"

Pires was later fired for his handling of the 2006–2007 Brazilian aviation crisis.

Sharkey's 1994 book Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy is an investigation of the psychiatric industry. Focusing on sensational cases in the United States, Sharkey exposed how powerful elements within the industry maneuvered to exploit new markets when health insurance providers began covering costs for in-hospital mental health treatment. He traced soaring mental health costs to the often criminal marketing practices of biological psychiatry, which Sharkey asserted began when the number of psychiatric hospitals boomed in the late 1980s. He provided anecdotal tales of people coerced into treatment on fabricated pretenses, and compared schemes to fill beds at for-profit mental and addiction facilities, which were offering bounties to clergy, teachers, police and "crisis counselors," to the business plan of the Holiday Inn hotel chain.

The psychiatric industry, warned Sharkey, whose late father-in-law was a respected psychiatrist involved in setting up non-profit mental health clinics during the 1980s in New York state, has been lobbying legislatures for an increasing share of government health spending. Despite such warnings by Sharkey and mental health watchdogs, similar practices have continued to evolve in Texas (where many of the events depicted in Bedlam took place), in the form of the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, and at the federal level with the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.

Joe Sharkey (born October 15, 1946) is an American author and former columnist for The New York Times. His columns focused mostly on business travel, while his non-fiction books focus on criminality. Sharkey also co-authored a novel. He has been the Assistant National Editor for The Wall Street Journal, the City Editor for the Albany Times-Union, and a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Formerly residing in the New York area, he and his wife live in Tucson, Arizona.