Marc Rainer Books in Order

If you want to read from the beginning: Capital Kill → Horns of the Devil → Death's White Horses
If you want Washington cases with politics and counterterror stakes: A Winter of Wolves → Death Votes Last
If you want the Kansas City books: Mob Rules → The Grinding Wheel
If you want the biggest international threat: Oracle

Marc Rainer is the pen name of Charles Ambrose Jr., a crime novelist who came to fiction after a long career in law. He was born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, about an hour from the Gulf of Mexico. He has said the name Marc Rainer honors his younger brother Marc and his mother's maiden name, Rainer.

Before he wrote novels, he spent decades building cases.

Ambrose attended the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, later earned a master's degree in history from the University of Southern Mississippi, and then a law degree from the University of Mississippi. He went on to serve as an Air Force JAG circuit prosecutor and later worked as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., and Kansas City, Missouri.

That career gave him plenty of material. Across more than thirty years in practice, he tried hundreds of major cases, including homicides, conspiracy cases, mafia prosecutions, and other organized crime matters. He also co-authored a manual on trying murder cases for the American Bar Association's Criminal Law Section.

Writing started in a very practical way, after retirement. Ambrose has said he came home with years of courtroom and investigation stories, and his wife kept telling him he should write a book. He also wanted to do something many thrillers skip, put a prosecutor at the center and get the details of police work, evidence, and trial strategy right.

That idea became Capital Kill, the first Jeff Trask novel. The book put a federal prosecutor into a Washington murder investigation and later reached number one in Amazon's Kindle mystery series rankings. From there he kept going with books like Horns of the Devil, Death's White Horses, and A Winter of Wolves, all of them mixing fast-moving cases with the nuts and bolts of how those cases are actually built.

Realism is the hook.

Ambrose has said he uses real criminal organizations, real investigative techniques, real courtroom procedure, and sometimes even trial transcripts, with names changed where needed. That shows up in later books too, whether Jeff Trask is dealing with a political killing in Death Votes Last, fentanyl and mafia violence in Mob Rules, a serial murderer in The Grinding Wheel, or a wider espionage threat in Oracle. Readers who like his work usually point to the team investigations, the courtroom pressure, and the sense that the law matters, even when the people using it are tired, stubborn, or badly outnumbered.

He does not write about lone geniuses floating above the system. His books are full of prosecutors, agents, detectives, analysts, gang figures, cartel leaders, and politicians, the kinds of people who make a case messier and more human. Even when the plots get large, the tension often comes down to a witness, a piece of evidence, or one bad decision made at the wrong time.

Today he lives in the Northwest with his wife, a retired Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent, and their rescue dogs. It feels fitting. The man who spent years arguing cases in court now spends his time asking a slightly different question, what happens next if the facts are true?