Richard Herman Books in Order

If you want his classic fighter-pilot stories: The Warbirds → Force of Eagles.
If you want geopolitical thrillers with a woman president: Power Curve → Edge of Honor → The Last Phoenix.
If you want the Matt Pontowski combat arc: Firebreak → Call to Duty → Dark Wing → Iron Gate.
If you want courtroom and diplomatic intrigue: Against All Enemies → A Far Justice.
If you want modern missions and humanitarian airlift: The Trash Haulers → The Peacemakers → The China Sea.

Richard Herman grew up in Los Angeles, where fast jets roaring overhead were part of the backdrop long before he ever climbed into a cockpit. He joined the US Air Force young and found his calling not as a stick-and-rudder pilot but as a weapons systems officer. For more than two decades he sat in the second seat of combat aircraft, watching missions succeed or fail from a vantage point few civilians ever imagine.

Those years would become the raw material for the techno-thrillers he later wrote.

Over twenty one years of service he flew in C 130 Hercules transports and F 4 Phantoms, logging more than 240 combat missions during two tours in Southeast Asia. He served as an operations plans officer and spent time teaching cadets at the Air Force Academy, passing on hard earned lessons about tactics, discipline, and the quiet work that keeps a squadron alive.

When he retired in 1983 with the rank of major, Herman did not head straight for the bestseller lists. He moved to the Sacramento area, taught social studies and English at a junior high school in North Highlands, and slowly discovered that the stories he could not shake were the ones that took place at altitude.

Writing was, as he has joked, his third career. In his early fifties he finished his first novel, The Warbirds, a story about a troubled F 4 wing, a hard driving commander, and a gifted but reckless pilot named Jack Locke. The book drew on the rhythms of squadron life he knew by heart, from long hours on the ramp to the politics that swirl around every deployment.

The sequel, Force of Eagles, confirmed that readers were ready to follow those characters into even riskier airspace.

Herman kept widening the canvas. In the Matt Pontowski novels, beginning with Firebreak and Call to Duty, he follows the grandson of a US president from brash Eagle driver to seasoned commander, mixing close in air combat with questions about loyalty, faith, and what it costs to send friends into harm's way. With the Madeline Turner books such as Power Curve, Edge of Honor, and The Last Phoenix, he shifts part of the action into the Oval Office, imagining how a first woman president might juggle domestic pressure, foreign crises, and a complicated private life while still leaning on trusted military advisers.

Stand alone novels like Against All Enemies, The Trojan Sea, A Far Justice, The Peacemakers, The Trash Haulers, and The China Sea take his interests even further afield. Some center on legal and diplomatic battles, others on humanitarian airlift in places like Sudan or on covert operations in the South China Sea, but they share the same backbone. The aircraft are described with affection and precision, yet the real focus stays on people trying to do their jobs under crushing political and moral pressure.

Although Herman writes about global stakes, his working life is deliberately ordinary. He and his wife, Sheila, settled in Gold River, a suburb of Sacramento, where he drafts, revises, and then slips out to a local book group or a quiet dinner with other writers. He reads widely, studies how different kinds of novels handle character, and likes to talk not about hardware but about how people change when everything on the page goes wrong.

Travel has been part of his research toolkit, from time spent in Poland while outlining Edge of Honor to regular trips back to his wife's native England. At home he enjoys sailing small boats, a slower kind of navigation than threading an F 4 through bad weather but one that still depends on judgment and timing. His thrillers reflect that mix of precision and patience, written by someone who has seen both the exhilaration and the cost of modern air war up close.