Richard Greener Books in Order

If you want the main Walter Sherman story: The Knowland Retribution → The Lacey Confession
If you want the sharper revenge thriller first: The Knowland Retribution
If you like conspiracy driven suspense: The Lacey Confession
If you want Richard Greener at his most personal: Trapped

Richard Greener was born in the Bronx on October 14, 1941, and grew up in New York City. He graduated from Bard in 1963, but long before he published fiction he had already built a life around conversation, politics, business, and storytelling. That mix would matter later, because his books feel written by someone who had spent a long time watching how power works.

He built his first career in broadcasting. Greener worked in radio sales in New York, specialized for a time in Black radio, and later became a well known executive in Atlanta. He spent more than twenty five years in the business, won a CEBA Award for excellence in business, and developed the sharp sense of pace and audience that would carry into his fiction.

Writing came later.

A genetic heart condition shaped much of his adult life. His health had shadowed him since youth, and repeated heart attacks eventually forced him to retire from WAOK in 1988. Over time he spent more and more hours at home, and he later said that sitting upright at a computer at night helped ease his chest pain. Writing started not as a grand career plan but as something practical, a way to get through long, painful nights.

While waiting for a heart transplant, he began working seriously on fiction. Family encouragement helped push the manuscripts out into the world, and by 2006 he had found an agent and a publisher. At almost the same moment, he was facing the surgery that would give him a new heart and change the rest of his life.

He wrote his way into a second act.

Greener is best known for the Walter Sherman books, The Knowland Retribution and The Lacey Confession. Sherman, known as the Locator, is a Vietnam veteran with an almost eerie gift for finding people and things. Through him, Greener wrote about corporate greed, political secrets, revenge, survival, and the uneasy line between justice and payback. The settings range from St. John in the Caribbean to Atlanta, New York, Europe, and Mexico.

In The Knowland Retribution, a deadly tainted meat scandal sets off a revenge hunt, and Sherman is pulled into a case where money and morality keep colliding. The Lacey Confession moves into missing persons, conspiracy, and a confession tied to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Readers who like Greener usually respond to the same things, strong setups, broad landscapes, and the feeling that these are adult thrillers about grown people with history. His Locator books later loosely inspired the television series The Finder.

His most personal book is Trapped, a short memoir drawn from the aftermath of his 2006 heart transplant. He spent weeks in a coma after surgery and later wrote about the fear, confusion, and psychological shock of survival rather than turning the experience into a neat recovery story. Greener lived in the Atlanta area with his wife Maria, and the couple had four children. He died on December 24, 2019, after living nearly fourteen years with his transplanted heart. That hard won perspective gives all of his work a little extra tension.