Born in Orange, New Jersey, Anthony Bruno is a graduate of Boston University where, as an undergraduate, he was accepted into Donald Barthelme's graduate creative writing workshop. He later earned a master's in Medieval Studies from Boston College.

While living in Boston, he worked as an archivist for the Boston University Twentieth Century Archives. After finishing graduate school, he moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, and started working in book publishing in Manhattan. His big break as a writer came in 1988 when his crime novel Bad Guys was published in hardcover.

Bad Guys was the first in a series of novels (Bad Blood, Bad Luck, Bad Business, Bad Moon, and Bad Apple) about FBI agents Mike Tozzi and Cuthbert Gibbons, odd-couple partners whose prime targets are New York and New Jersey wiseguys. Basing his stories on actual Mafia figures and their criminal activities, Bruno pioneered the territory that has made The Sopranos the monster hit that it is. Rave reviews compared Bruno to Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake. People called Gibbons and Tozzi "the best fictional cop duo around."

Bruno turned to non-fiction for his next project. The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer is an in-depth profile of convicted murderer Richard Kuklinski, who claims to have killed over 100 people. Kuklinski was dubbed "the Iceman" when one of his victims was found in the woods, his heart frozen solid. Kuklinski had stored the man's body in an ice-cream truck for two years before dumping it in order to disguise the time of death. In researching this book, Bruno corresponded with Kuklinski extensively and interviewed him in prison-locked in a room alone with the killer, no glass partition separating them, noguards in sight.

In 1995 Bruno wrote Seven: The Novelization based on the runaway hit feature film starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

For his next fiction series, Bruno created a new law-enforcement duo, parole officers Loretta Kovacs and Frank Marvelli of the New Jersey Parole Violators Search Unit. Loretta and Marvelli made their debut in Devil's Food in which zaftig Loretta goes undercover at a Florida fat farm in order to nab a crafty embezzler. The second book in this series, Double Espresso, was nominated for an Anthony Award in 1998. The latest entry, Hot Fudge, takes Loretta and Marvelli into the world of gourmet ice cream and kinky sex as they track down a criminal opportunist who's looking to add murder to his extensive rap sheet.

The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter's Story, Bruno's latest non-fiction work, recounts the life and adventures of America's most unique and most successful bounty hunter, Joshua Armstrong, the leader of the Seekers, an elite Mission: Impossible-style team whose most effective weapon is their spirituality. The Seekers was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book in 2001.

In February 2004 a television movie adaptation of Bruno's novel Bad Apple, starring and produced by actor Chris Noth, premiered on TNT.

Bruno is also a fourth-degree black belt in aikido.