David E Grogan Books in Order

David E. Grogan grew up with one foot in military life and the other in a close-knit Ohio town. He was born on an Air Force base in Rome, New York, where his father was a fighter pilot. When his father left the service, the family moved to Olmsted Falls, Ohio, and that is where Grogan spent most of his childhood.

He remembers it as a classic small town, with a village green, the Rocky River, a waterfall downtown, a steel bridge, and an ice cream shop near the outdoor basketball court. Most people knew one another. Grogan wanted to see a little more of the world.

At 18, he headed to the College of William & Mary. There he met Sharon, who would become his wife, although they did not begin dating until their final months as students. After graduation, they moved to Houston, where Grogan worked for three years as a certified public accountant, reviewing real estate deals.

That job taught him useful things, but it was not the life he wanted. He and Sharon moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, so he could attend the University of Virginia School of Law.

A party during law school changed his plans. Grogan met a Navy officer studying on a Navy scholarship and heard stories about life aboard an aircraft carrier. He rearranged his future around becoming a Navy judge advocate, or JAG, expecting it might be a short detour before a corporate legal career.

It became a 26-year career on active duty. Grogan prosecuted and defended court-martial cases, negotiated in capitals around the world, lived in Japan, Cuba, and Bahrain, and deployed aboard the USS Enterprise in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. Those experiences gave him the legal knowledge, military detail, and international settings that run through his fiction.

His route to novels began with a human-rights class in law school. The subject stayed with him, and he began shaping it into what became The Siegel Dispositions. The process was slow. Between Navy assignments, revisions, and the work of finding an agent, it took about 13 years for the book to reach publication in 2014.

That novel introduced retired Navy JAG Steve Stilwell, a civilian attorney whose cases pull him into crimes with long historical shadows. Sapphire Pavilion follows Stilwell to Vietnam, where a jailed friend, a missing wartime aircraft, and a dangerous file open an international investigation. In The Hidden Key, Stilwell and his law partner Casey Pantel chase the meaning of an ancient clay tablet while threats close in from several directions.

Grogan's stories return to questions of duty, loyalty, veterans' lives, history, and the consequences that outlast a single case. He also created Voices To Veterans, a nonfiction project that helps preserve service members' stories.

He lives in Savoy, Illinois, with Sharon, and they have three children.