Alex Ryan Books in Order

Alex Ryan is the shared pen name used by thriller writers Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson for their Nick Foley novels. It is a fittingly compact name for a partnership built around fast-moving stories, military experience, scientific threats, and international pressure.

Andrews came to fiction with a background that already sounds like thriller material. He studied psychology at Vanderbilt University, later earned a business degree from Cornell, and served as an officer aboard a fast-attack nuclear submarine. He also worked as a nuclear engineer, experience that helped give his books an interest in high-stakes technology and the people asked to handle it.

Wilson took a different route through equally demanding work. He grew up in the Williamsburg area of Virginia, worked as a paramedic after high school, and studied biology at William & Mary. His long list of jobs has included firefighter, diving instructor, jet pilot, naval officer, and vascular and trauma surgeon. During his Navy service, he deployed as a combat surgeon in Iraq and Afghanistan, including work supporting Naval Special Warfare units.

Writing gave Wilson a creative outlet during high-pressure jobs.

The two men met at a thriller writers' conference in New York in 2012. They became friends first, then began trading ideas and figuring out whether their different skill sets could work on the same page. A few years later, Andrews asked Wilson to collaborate on a novel. What began as planning and military advice turned into a full writing partnership.

They started writing together in 2015, and the Alex Ryan name arrived soon after. Beijing Red, published in 2016, introduced Nick Foley, a former Navy SEAL in China who is drawn into a dangerous disease outbreak. Hong Kong Black followed in 2017, bringing Nick and microbiologist Dazhong “Dash” Chen into a new case with intelligence, medical, and criminal threads.

The Nick Foley books put trained people in situations where knowing how to fight is only part of the job. Nick has to navigate a country that is not his home, work with people whose motives are not always clear, and face threats that can spread faster than any one person can control. Wilson's medical background and Andrews's technical experience give the stories a practical interest in how crises work on the ground.

Outside the Alex Ryan byline, Andrews and Wilson write together as Andrews & Wilson. Their work includes the Tier One, Sons of Valor, and Shepherds series, as well as novels set in the Jack Ryan world. Across those projects, they return to service, teamwork, intelligence work, and the hard choices that arrive when a mission becomes personal.

Their process is collaborative from the start. They brainstorm, divide chapters or points of view, trade pages, and edit each other's work before combining it into a draft. Alex Ryan may be a pen name, but it represents a real two-person operation, one that brings two very different professional histories into the same kind of high-pressure thriller.