Miles A Maxwell Books in Order

If you want the main post-disaster thriller: Loss of Reason → Search for Reason → Finding Reason → Escape To Reason
If you want the political prequel first: Drone → Loss of Reason
If you want FBI-led mystery cases: Die By The Pen → Vibrate
If you want a quick side story before the later books: The Haunted House → Finding Reason

Miles A. Maxwell writes thrillers that like to test big systems, cities, governments, power grids, belief, and the people caught inside them. He has been based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and his path to fiction was anything but narrow. Before he focused on novels, he built and sold several companies, flew as an IFR-certified private pilot, and picked up a grab bag of technical and practical knowledge that later turned into plot fuel.

He seems drawn to scale.

One of the clearest turning points in his writing life came from living in New York. Maxwell has said that years before 9/11 he lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side and would lie awake listening to sirens, wondering what a truly catastrophic attack on the city might look like. That worry eventually became the seed of Loss of Reason, the book that opens his State of Reason story world.

He did not rush that idea onto the page. In interviews and author notes, Maxwell has said it took about fifteen years to rough out the full arc of the series and complete the first two books. After selling businesses and gaining the freedom to spend long stretches on fiction, he pushed hard on the work, sometimes for eighty hours a week, and used feedback from hundreds of paid readers to keep reshaping the story until it felt ready.

That long runway shows up in the books. Maxwell has described touring power plants, studying the effects of nuclear destruction, and doing deep research for later novels on topics as far apart as shamanism and fish owls. He has also said he studies herbs used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, a subject he has followed for more than fifteen years. Add in a self-described knack for several languages, bits and pieces of ten of them by one account, and you get a writer who clearly enjoys learning enough about a subject to build a thriller around it.

Loss of Reason and Search for Reason are the clearest examples of his big-canvas approach. They start with catastrophe and family rescue, then widen into conspiracy, infrastructure failure, religion, and geopolitics. Finding Reason carries that larger investigation forward. On the other side of his bibliography, Die By The Pen and Vibrate follow Naomi Soul through stranger, tighter mystery plots, one built around murdered authors, the other around mysterious deaths among New York billionaires. Even the shorter Drone shows the same taste for high stakes, mixing terrorism, politics, and constitutional danger in a compact package.

He writes like someone who enjoys asking how things really work.

That matters because Maxwell's fiction is not only about action. Again and again, his books circle back to questions of power, fear, belief, technology, and what people do when institutions fail them. He has said that injustice strongly motivates his writing, and that feeling comes through in the way his characters keep pushing against systems that are broken, corrupt, or simply too slow to help.

Away from the desk, the details are a little old-school and adventurous. Public author bios describe him as a pilot, a surfer, skier, sailor, and scuba diver. They also place him in Wyoming, far from the concrete pressure that helped inspire his first major series. That feels fitting. Maxwell's novels often put people in extreme situations, but the current behind them is simple enough: stay alert, think clearly, and do not assume the world is as stable as it looks.