Advise and Consent Books in Order

The Advise and Consent books are Drury's core Washington novels, six volumes that treat government as a living system made up of senators, presidents, diplomats, journalists, and political operators. They do not belong to one hero. The point is the whole machine, and the way a public crisis spreads from hearing rooms to private apartments, newspapers, party meetings, and foreign capitals.

Advise and Consent begins with the nomination of Robert Leffingwell for Secretary of State and the Senate fight over whether to confirm him. That setup tells you almost everything about the series. Drury likes procedure, but he uses it to uncover ego, fear, ideology, and old secrets. The Senate is not background scenery here. It is the arena.

These books love procedure because procedure is where power hides.

From there the story keeps widening. A Shade of Difference moves into the United Nations and links Cold War diplomacy to racial conflict in the United States and Africa. Capable of Honor and Preserve and Protect push toward presidential politics, convention warfare, succession questions, and a party fighting over what kind of country it wants to be. The cast grows, but so do the stakes.

One of the strangest and most interesting things about this series is how it ends. Preserve and Protect closes with an assassination crisis, and Drury chose to follow it with two different continuations. Come Nineveh, Come Tyre and The Promise of Joy are alternate sequels, each exploring a different political future from the same violent turning point. If you are reading in order, that split is not a mistake. It is part of the design.

The tone is serious, argumentative, and often more interested in institutions than intimacy. Expect big casts, long conversations, ideological clashes, and a strong sense that public life has moral weight. Even when the novels get melodramatic, the appeal is the insider feel. Drury spent years covering the Senate, and these books are at their best when they make committee rooms, floor speeches, and back-channel bargaining feel as tense as any thriller.

If you want a Washington novel where the arguments are the action, start here.