Barry Donadio Books in Order

If you want the real-life story first: TWA Flight 800 First Responder Witness Account
If you want to see his range: TWA Flight 800 First Responder Witness Account → That Day When Hell Froze Over
If you want the fiction side first: That Day When Hell Froze Over

Barry Donadio was born in Bay Shore, New York, and spent parts of his early life in Galveston, Texas, Oakdale, New York, and Port Jefferson Station on Long Island. That mix of places matters because his writing does not come out of a neat literary path. It comes out of movement, public service, and years spent close to emergencies and security work.

Before he published a book, Donadio had already worked in volunteer ambulance service, volunteer fire departments, the Army and Army National Guard, local law enforcement, the Air Force side of the New York Air National Guard, and later the U.S. Secret Service. His published career timeline also places him at the White House during the Bush and Obama years, and he went on to found Public Security LLC in 2013.

That is not a typical road to authorship.

A clear turning point in his writing life was the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. Donadio was 25 when he responded as an emergency medical technician, and his biography also places him with the 106th Rescue Wing at Gabreski Air National Guard Base at the time. Years later, he turned that experience into TWA Flight 800 First Responder Witness Account, published in 2013.

Readers usually come to that book for a firsthand view of a night many Americans still remember. Donadio writes about the rescue response, what he saw at the crash scene, and what unfolded at the Coast Guard station in East Moriches, where victims were brought ashore. He does not build the book around a final explanation of the crash. He stays close to what he witnessed and how the response unfolded.

Then he turned hard into fiction.

His 2019 book That Day When Hell Froze Over heads back more than a thousand years and imagines an elite band of Catholic knights sent by the Pope on a secret mission into territory in what is now Afghanistan and Iran. The setup is part historical adventure, part supernatural war story. Gabriel appears. Satan appears. Yet even with that big shift in genre, the core interests feel familiar: danger, duty, combat, and people trying to hold formation when everything around them turns chaotic.

Taken together, those books show the range of Donadio's interests. One is rooted in eyewitness testimony and emergency response. The other leans into faith, violence, and mythic struggle. What connects them is his attraction to high-stakes situations and to people under pressure. He has also published later work connected to family history and New York roots, which fits the same impulse to document what he thinks should not be forgotten.

These days, Donadio's public biography lists Chester, Maryland, as his home base. He continues to run Public Security LLC and stays active in public life while adding to his writing career. If you are coming to his books for the first time, expect a body of work shaped less by the usual writerly route and more by lived experience, uniformed service, and a strong pull toward real events and charged historical scenarios.