Bernard B Kerik Books in Order

Bernard B. Kerik was born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 4, 1955, and grew up in Paterson. His early life later became central to The Lost Son, a memoir that connects his public career with a painful family question: why his mother left when he was a child.

He left Eastside High School as a teenager, earned a GED during a stint in the U.S. Army, and served as a military police officer in South Korea. After the Army, he worked in security in Saudi Arabia before returning to New Jersey.

That return led him into corrections and policing. He became a jail warden in Passaic County, joined the NYPD in 1986, and worked uniformed and plainclothes assignments, including narcotics work. The job put him close to the daily pressures behind the institutions he would later write about.

He wasn't a writer who came up through workshops or journalism. His books came from a career spent inside police stations, jails, and government offices.

Kerik rose through New York City government under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, serving as corrections commissioner before becoming the city's 40th police commissioner on August 21, 2000. He led the NYPD during the September 11, 2001 attacks and the rescue and recovery work that followed. That period made him a familiar national figure.

The Lost Son arrived in 2001. It moves between Paterson, law-enforcement work, his search for his mother, and his experience at the center of New York during and after September 11. Readers looking for a direct, first-person account of a police career and a personal reckoning will find the two threads running side by side. An updated edition added material on the attacks' aftermath.

His public life took a sharp turn after a 2004 nomination to lead the Department of Homeland Security collapsed. He later pleaded guilty to federal charges including tax fraud and false statements, served time in federal prison, and received a presidential pardon in 2020. In From Jailer to Jailed, he writes about confinement after having run correctional systems himself, focusing on solitary confinement, the imbalance of power, and his calls for reform.

In 2018, he tried fiction with The Grave Above the Grave. The novel follows a New York police commissioner coping with the legacy of 9/11 while facing a cop killing, political scrutiny, and a possible terrorist plot. It uses the pace and institutional detail of a police thriller.

His books are tied to the jobs and crises that shaped his life. Readers can move from the autobiographical The Lost Son to the prison-focused From Jailer to Jailed, then switch gears with The Grave Above the Grave.

Kerik died in New York City on May 29, 2025, at age 69. His writing remains a record of a life spent near the difficult edges of public power and accountability.