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Harold Robbins Books in Order

This page collects all the Harold Robbins books in order, with summaries, series guides, reading order tips, and where‑to‑start advice for his sex‑and‑power blockbusters.

Last updated: June 7, 2026

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30 books

Never Love a Stranger

by Harold Robbins

1948

Frankie Kane grows up on New Yorks rough streets, expelled from a Catholic orphanage when his Jewish roots are exposed. Turning to crime, he rises through the syndicate even as his boyhood friend becomes a prosecutor determined to bring him down.

The Dream Merchants

by Harold Robbins

1949

A penniless young hustler heads west at the dawn of the movie business and helps build a studio from scratch. As silent films give way to sound, his ambition, love life, and ruthlessness shape a behind‑the‑scenes history of early Hollywood.

A Stone for Danny Fisher

by Harold Robbins

1952

In Depression‑era Brooklyn, gifted boxer Danny Fisher fights to keep his family afloat while chasing love with a girl his parents dislike. One bad decision pulls him toward the mob, forcing him to choose between easy money and the future he wants.

Never Leave Me

by Harold Robbins

1954

Set in sleek Manhattan offices instead of back‑alley bars, this novel follows a driven advertising executive whose talent, affairs, and hunger for status push him to the top. The higher he climbs, the more brutally his personal life begins to unravel.

79 Park Avenue

by Harold Robbins

1955

From the slums of New York to a plush Park Avenue office, Marja reinvents herself as Maryann Flood, the citys most sought‑after madam. When the law finally catches up, she must face the prosecutor who is also the only man she truly loves.

Stiletto

by Harold Robbins

1960

A jet‑setting playboy hides a deadlier job as a Mafia assassin, dispatching enemies with his signature blade. When he tries to walk away from the life that made him rich, his former employers send killers to make sure he never talks.

The Carpetbaggers

by Harold Robbins

1961

Heir to an explosives fortune, Jonas Cord storms into aviation and Hollywood, collecting companies and lovers with equal recklessness. His rise from furious young tycoon to legendary mogul leaves wreckage in boardrooms, bedrooms, and every relationship he touches.

Where Love Has Gone

by Harold Robbins

1962

After a troubled fifteen‑year‑old girl kills her mothers latest lover, a sensational trial rips open decades of family secrets. Moving between wartime romance and present‑day scandal, the story shows how privilege, ambition, and neglect can twist love into tragedy.

The Adventurers

by Harold Robbins

1966

Dax Xenos watches soldiers destroy his family in a turbulent South American country, then grows up amid revolution, exile, and European high society. His life becomes a cycle of coups, love affairs, and betrayals as he tries to claim power on his own terms.

The Inheritors

by Harold Robbins

1969

This sweeping saga follows the next generation that stands to inherit a vast business empire. As fortunes shift and alliances fracture, heirs, lovers, and rivals learn that money and power can be passed down, but real control is never guaranteed for long.

The Betsy

by Harold Robbins

1971

Detroit auto baron Loren Hardeman bets his fading company on a radical new car named for his great‑granddaughter. He recruits racer Angelo Perino to design it, igniting a brutal family feud where old scandals, boardroom coups, and forbidden affairs collide.

The Pirate

by Harold Robbins

1974

In this modern tale of piracy, a charismatic tycoon builds a fortune trading on ships, oil, and war while balancing loyalties to East and West. Lavish yachts, desert kingdoms, and tangled love affairs all threaten to sink the empire he has created.

The Lonely Lady

by Harold Robbins

1976

Gifted writer Jerilee Randall learns early that in Hollywood talent is never enough. Used by powerful men, numbed by pills, and tempted by women who seem kinder, she fights through breakdown and exploitation to write the script that finally tells her own story.

Dreams Die First

by Harold Robbins

1978

Gareth Brendan rides a wave of sex, drugs, and easy money as he turns a small advertising throwaway into a hard‑core publishing empire. Caught between mobbed‑up distributors, violent rivals, and his own appetites, he risks losing everything he built on provocation.

Memories of Another Day

by Harold Robbins

1979

Dan starts as a milltown kid and becomes a fierce union organizer, battling company thugs, corrupt officials, and his own compromises. After his death, his estranged son retraces that journey, uncovering the personal cost behind a lifetime spent chasing justice and power.

Goodbye, Janette

by Harold Robbins

1981

A mother and her two daughters survive a brutal wartime prison camp and reinvent themselves in the glamorous world of high fashion. Fame and wealth bring them into a maze of obsessive love affairs and dangerous games that blur desire, pain, and control.

Spellbinder

by Harold Robbins

1982

Known only as Preacher, a Vietnam veteran starts a scruffy traveling church preaching peace, love, and charity. When a billionaire launches him on television, he becomes a superstar televangelist who must choose between protecting his empire and exposing its corruption.

The Storyteller

by Harold Robbins

1982

Brooklyn street kid Joe Crowne is determined to escape gangsters and cheap hustles by becoming a writer. From Hollywood backlots to glittering European resorts, success brings him money and women, but also the question of what he is willing to sacrifice for a great story.

Descent from Xanadu

by Harold Robbins

1984

Judd Crane is a billionaire playboy who refuses to accept that even his wealth cannot buy more time. His obsessive global hunt for a scientific way to cheat death leads through secret labs, hostile regimes, and betrayals that threaten his empire and his soul.

The Piranhas

by Harold Robbins

1991

Trying to distance himself from a powerful Mafia family, Jed Stevens joins a cocaine deal deep in the Amazon that ends in blood and real piranhas. Back in New York, he battles financial sharks on Wall Street who may be even more lethal.

The Predators

by Harold Robbins

1995

Jerry Cooper claws his way out of Depression‑era poverty through street hustles, wartime service, and a long, dangerous alliance with organized crime. As he transforms himself into a globe‑spanning businessman, he learns that predators rule every world, from slums to boardrooms.

The Raiders

by Harold Robbins

1995

In this sequel to The Carpetbaggers, aging tycoon Jonas Cord discovers the brilliant son he never acknowledged and grooms him as heir. Their uneasy partnership plays out against corporate raids, Cold War politics, and a new generation hungry for its own share of power.

The Stallion

by Harold Robbins

1996

Return to the Hardeman auto dynasty as designer and former racer Angelo Perino comes back to build a daring new car, the Stallion. Corporate sabotage, family vendettas, and erotic entanglements turn the fight to save Bethlehem Motors into a brutal personal war.

Tycoon

by Harold Robbins

1996

Jack Lear, the ambitious son of a Jewish scrap dealer, defies his father and builds a coast‑to‑coast radio and television network. Over four decades, his hunger for acceptance in the old‑money world drives his marriages, his affairs, and every ruthless deal he makes.

The Secret

by Harold Robbins

2000

Picking up threads from The Predators, this novel follows a new generation that turns a chain of provocative lingerie shops into a booming empire. Behind the glossy storefronts lie hidden mob ties, family secrets, and an heir torn between profit and desire.

Never Enough

by Harold Robbins

2001

Wall Street banker David Shea built a luxurious life on charm, insider deals, and a killing he helped cover up as a teenager. When old friends and new investigations resurface, the past crashes into his schemes, threatening his fortune and his freedom.

Sin City

by Harold Robbins

2002

Zack Riordan grows up poor in Las Vegas knowing only that the casino world destroyed his mother. Tutored by card cheats and hustlers, he becomes a brilliant security expert, then a casino owner himself, determined to control the town that once used him.

Heat of Passion

by Harold Robbins

2003

Playboy Win Liberte thinks of diamonds as toys until bad bets and family betrayal wipe out his inheritance. To rebuild, he takes over a risky mine in war‑torn Angola and soon finds himself battling warlords, rivals, and a powerful global cartel.

The Last of the Realists

by Harold Robbins

2006

This concise biography of GK Chesterton looks past the famous wit to his political and economic ideas. It traces how his advocacy of distributism and social justice shaped his essays, fiction, and public battles in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Looters

by Harold Robbins

2007

Madison Dupre, an ambitious New York art curator, lands a career‑making coup by acquiring a legendary Babylonian death mask. When an Iraqi man claims it was stolen from Baghdads museum and winds up dead, Madison becomes the prime suspect and must run to prove her innocence.

Where should I start?

If you want his early rise‑from‑nothing sagas: Never Love a StrangerThe Dream MerchantsA Stone for Danny Fisher
If you want the big Hollywood and aviation epic: The CarpetbaggersThe Raiders
If you like auto‑industry family drama: The BetsyThe Stallion
If you enjoy sexy showbiz and jet‑set scandal: 79 Park AvenueThe AdventurersThe Lonely Lady
If you prefer late‑period high‑finance thrillers: The PredatorsThe SecretNever EnoughSin City

Author bio

Harold Robbins was born Harold Rubin in New York City on May 21, 1916, to Jewish parents who had emigrated from the old Russian Empire. His father was a pharmacist, and the family settled in Brooklyn, a few subway stops and a whole world away from the glitter he later wrote about.

He dropped out of high school as a teenager and hustled through a string of jobs: errand boy, bookies runner, grocery inventory clerk. Later he liked to say he made and lost an early fortune betting on commodities like sugar. Whether every detail of those stories is exact or not, they capture something true about him: he was always fascinated by risk, money, and the people willing to gamble everything.

In 1940 he took a job at Universal Pictures, starting at the bottom and working his way up to an executive role. For more than a decade he watched how movies were made, how stars were packaged, and how deals actually got done. Those years behind the studio gates gave him the working knowledge of Hollywood that would power several of his biggest novels.

Robbins began writing on the side, and his first novel, Never Love a Stranger, appeared in 1948. The book’s raw mix of sex, crime, and urban grit was controversial enough to be banned in some places, but readers devoured it. He followed quickly with The Dream Merchants, a rags‑to‑riches story set in the early film industry, and A Stone for Danny Fisher, a serious tale of a Brooklyn boxer during the Great Depression that later became the Elvis Presley film King Creole.

The book that changed his life was The Carpetbaggers in 1961. Its aviation and Hollywood tycoon, Jonas Cord, was widely read as a loose blend of real moguls, and the novel’s unapologetic sex and ruthless business tactics made it a sensation. Other blockbusters followed: 79 Park Avenue, The Adventurers, The Betsy, The Lonely Lady and more, many of them turned into films or television miniseries. At his peak he was a fixture on bestseller lists around the world.

Robbins’s fiction rarely stayed in one place. He moved his stories through industries and decades: early Hollywood, the jet‑age aircraft boom, Detroit’s auto wars, South American revolutions, Las Vegas casinos, Wall Street, the diamond trade. What tied them together were hungry characters on the make, a lot of explicit sex, and a sharp eye for how power really works when the doors close.

His personal life often looked like one of his novels. He married three times, to Lillian Machnivitz, Grace Palermo, and finally Jann Stapp. He spent long stretches on yachts and in villas on the French Riviera and in Monte Carlo, moved in and out of casino high‑roller rooms, and collected famous friends along the way. He even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a rare honor for a novelist.

In later years Robbins’s health declined, but his name never disappeared from the shelves. After his death in 1997 in Palm Springs, his widow Jann and trusted collaborators worked from his notes and drafts to complete new books. Titles like The Predators, The Secret, Never Enough, Sin City, Heat of Passion and the Madison Dupre thrillers carried his brand into a new century, sometimes with co‑writer Junius Podrug credited on the cover.

Today, readers still come to Robbins for big, unapologetic stories about sex, money, and ambition. His characters climb from tenements to penthouses, burn through fortunes, and learn how much it costs to get everything they thought they wanted. However outrageous the plots become, there is always a core question underneath: what are you willing to trade for power, and can you ever really walk away from the deal?

Edited by

Richard Reis

Software engineer whose passion for tracking book recommendations from podcasts inspired the creation of MRB.

Anurag Ramdasan

Lead investor at 3one4 Capital whose startup expertise and love for books helped shaped MRB and its growth.

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All 30 Harold Robbins Books in Order (Complete List 2026)