Michael Byars Lewis Books in Order

If you want Jason Conrad from the beginning: Retribution → Surly Bonds → The Right to Know → Veil of Deception → The Quiet Professional
If you want the best first sample of Lewis's military thrillers: Surly Bonds → Veil of Deception
If you want a standalone with more faith and historical mystery: The Pilate Scroll

Michael Byars Lewis was born in Ohio and grew up in an Air Force family. His early years took him from Washington, D.C., to Fort Walton Beach, Florida. His father was a pilot at Hurlburt Field and was killed in Vietnam in 1965.

After that, life kept moving. His mother remarried another Air Force serviceman, and the family later lived near Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. They eventually settled in Baton Rouge, where Lewis finished high school, attended Louisiana State University, and, a couple of years after college, joined the Air Force himself.

That decision shaped both halves of his working life. Lewis spent 25 years as an Air Force pilot, including 18 years in Air Force Special Operations. He flew the AC-130U Spooky Gunship on combat missions in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, served as an expeditionary squadron commander during combat operations in Iraq, and later taught and mentored younger pilots at the Air Force Special Operations Air Warfare Center's schoolhouse. After retiring from military service, he moved into civilian aviation and became a pilot for a major U.S. airline.

He did not have to imagine military flying from a distance.

Lewis has said the spark for fiction came after his own pilot training in the early 1990s. At first he thought about writing a straightforward book about how the Air Force can take an ordinary young person and turn them into a supersonic jet pilot in about a year. Then he realized the plain version felt flat. The better idea was to wrap that experience inside a spy story. That became Surly Bonds, his first novel, and it set the pattern for much of what followed.

The Jason Conrad books grow out of that choice. Retribution works as a prequel, introducing Conrad before pilot training, while Surly Bonds drops readers into the grind of flight school and then widens into Cold War intrigue. Later books like The Right to Know, Veil of Deception, and The Quiet Professional push the character into bigger national security problems, media pressure, secret projects, and missions that go bad fast. Readers who like Lewis usually point to the same thing: the flying, the base life, and the military chain of command feel lived in, because they are.

Jason Conrad is not built as a spotless action hero.

He is talented, proud, sometimes impulsive, and often one mistake away from trouble, which gives the series a more personal feel than a lot of procedure-heavy thrillers. Lewis also stepped outside that lane with The Pilate Scroll, a conspiracy thriller with a stronger Christian thread. It follows Kadie Jenkins, her younger brother, and a renegade pilot through a hunt tied to a 2,000-year-old mystery. The book shows that Lewis is just as interested in questions of faith, guilt, and redemption as he is in flight decks and weapons systems.

Off the page, Lewis has stayed active in the kinds of communities that shaped him. Public bios note his work mentoring college students on leadership and team-building, his involvement in leadership training, and his support for service members and their families through community and ministry work. He has also appeared on author panels at conferences and festivals around the country. These days he lives in Florida with his wife, Kim, and writes around a pilot's schedule, often early in the morning or while traveling. That mix of discipline, motion, and firsthand experience is all over his fiction.