David Rich Books in Order

David Rich came to fiction by taking the long way around.

His path took him through Tulane University, the University of Colorado, and the University of Chicago Law School, then into legal work in Arizona. He practiced law in Phoenix, taught legal writing, worked as an assistant attorney general, and later served as a judge pro tem. Before he was known for thrillers, he had already lived a few different professional lives.

Hollywood was the next big stop. Rich wrote the feature film Renegades, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips, and also wrote for television, including episodes of MacGyver and Stargate SG-1. He wrote plays too, among them The Interview, The Rescue, W.A.R. (Women's Armed Resistance), and later Meeting Marlon.

That background shows on the page.

His first two novels, Caravan of Thieves and Middle Man, introduce Rollie Waters, a Marine whose talent for undercover work is tangled up with the fact that he was raised by a con artist. Rich uses that setup for action, but also for something more personal. Rollie is good at reading people, shifting identities, and staying alive in bad situations, yet he never quite escapes the question of what he inherited from his father. Readers who click with these books usually like the mix of military suspense, crime plotting, and the family damage running underneath the missions.

Then he took a different turn with The Mirrored Palace. That novel reaches back to Richard Francis Burton and turns the explorer's 1853 Hajj into a historical adventure full of disguise, betrayal, and risk. It feels like a natural extension of Rich's interests: identity, performance, danger, and people who can never quite resist the next reckless choice.

He has also written outside fiction. Earlier came Myths of the Tribe, a nonfiction book about religion and ethics. Later, after retiring from law in his 40s, he spent years traveling widely, working as a sailing captain and pilot, and writing travel pieces as well as books such as RV the World. That side of his work helps explain something about the novels too. They like motion, unstable ground, strange borders, and characters who have to size up unfamiliar places fast.

He did not build one neat, single-lane career.

He is not really a pure procedural writer. Even in the Rollie Waters books, the cases and conspiracies matter less than the people moving through them, especially men who can charm, deceive, improvise, or run, but who cannot quite outrun themselves. That blend of momentum and moral unease is part of what gives his fiction its shape.

In more recent years he has continued to teach fiction and screenwriting in Connecticut while publishing across several forms. His career does not read like somebody who picked one lane early and stayed there. It reads like somebody who kept following story into the next room.