Patrick Larkin Books in Order

Patrick Larkin began writing when he was nine years old. A fourth-grade teacher read one of his stories aloud to the class, and the young writer got a memorable mix of embarrassment and excitement. The story had knights, archers, ambushes, and cavalry charges, which was a pretty clear preview of where his interests would lead.

History, especially military history, has been a constant for Larkin. As a child, he was drawn to illustrated accounts of famous battles, and he later turned that curiosity into a habit of digging through the details behind conflicts, politics, and the people caught in the middle. That interest would keep showing up in both his career choices and the kinds of danger he puts on the page.

After earning an English degree from the University of Chicago, Larkin went to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a researcher for the House of Representatives. Political and corporate speechwriting followed. It was useful training for a novelist: he learned how institutions work, how people present ideas under pressure, and how much can sit behind a carefully chosen public statement.

The route to novels took a quick stop in role-playing games.

Larkin wrote adventures for a Star Trek role-playing game and helped develop background material for the BattleTech universe. That work gave him room to build histories, technologies, and conflicts before a story ever reached its first action scene. It also connected a lifelong interest in military systems with the practical business of getting words onto the page.

In 1987, he began collaborating with Larry Bond. Their first novel, Red Phoenix, imagined a second Korean War and reached the New York Times bestseller list in 1989. The pair went on to write Vortex, Cauldron, The Enemy Within, and Day of Wrath, books built around geopolitical pressure, military planning, and characters who have to make decisions before the full picture is clear.

Those novels made room for jets, ships, intelligence work, and plenty of problems that cannot be solved from a safe distance.

Larkin later contributed two novels to Robert Ludlum's Covert-One line, The Lazarus Vendetta and The Moscow Vector. Both follow Jon Smith, an Army doctor and covert operative facing biological threats with international consequences. In The Tribune, Larkin moved in a different direction while staying close to his first love, history. The novel follows Roman officer Lucius Aurelius Valens through murder, corruption, and political danger in Judea under Tiberius.

More recently, Larkin has co-written military thrillers with Dale Brown, including the Nick Flynn novels and the final five books in the Patrick McLanahan storyline. These books bring his interest in technology and modern power struggles into settings shaped by Arctic operations, cyberwarfare, space, and covert action. He lives in Central Texas with his wife, and continues to read, research history, spend time with family, and develop new fiction projects.