Richard Wake Books in Order
Explore Richard Wake books in order, with quick summaries, series background, and easy where-to-start tips for Alex Kovacs, Peter Ritter, and La Rue.
Last updated: June 7, 2026
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Publication Order
21 books
The Spies of Zurich
by Richard Wake
2018
Exiled to Zurich after Austria and Czechoslovakia fall, Alex becomes a banker but cannot leave espionage behind. He knows Hitler's westward plans may be coming, if only he can make somebody listen in time.
Vienna at Nightfall
by Richard Wake
2018
In late-1930s Vienna, salesman Alex Kovacs sees Nazism closing in and reluctantly agrees to gather intelligence on his business trips to Germany. Then a personal tragedy turns a quiet life into a very dangerous one.
Paris in Disguise
by Richard Wake
2019
In occupied Paris, Alex works as courier and guide for a Resistance cell being gutted from within. To expose a traitor, he adopts a dangerous new identity and steps far too close to the Gestapo.
The Limoges Dilemma
by Richard Wake
2019
Smuggled into Limoges after a failed escape from the Gestapo, Alex is grieving and unsteady. Competing Resistance factions, revenge plots, and covert missions force him to decide what kind of man he can still be.
The Lyon Resistance
by Richard Wake
2019
After France falls, Alex and Manon reach Lyon and build a Resistance cell under Gestapo terror. Sabotage, fear, and the need to protect family push Alex toward choices that could destroy everything.
A Death in East Berlin
by Richard Wake
2020
Weeks before the Berlin Wall rises, young detective Peter Ritter is called to a gruesome murder at Treptower Park. His case opens onto life in East Berlin, where every homicide leads toward politics, fear, and the Stasi.
In the Shadow of the Wall
by Richard Wake
2020
Peter Ritter thought the Berlin Wall would never last, but months later it only grows stronger. When he risks everything to help a near-stranger escape East Germany, his comfortable compromises start to collapse.
The Agony of France
by Richard Wake
2020
Worn down by years in the Resistance, Alex joins Jewish fighters in occupied Paris for some of the war's harshest work. It is a brutal novel about survival, factional loyalties, and what vengeance costs.
To Normandy and Beyond
by Richard Wake
2021
As D-Day approaches and France erupts, Alex fights with the Resistance through invasion, reprisals, and street battles in Paris. The closer victory comes, the harder it is to ignore what the war has made of him.
Adrift in Istanbul
by Richard Wake
2022
In Cold War Istanbul, Alex expects East-West espionage and finds old Nazi networks instead. When an acquaintance is brutally killed, he is pulled into a feud that forces him to weigh revenge against justice.
Budapest in Pieces
by Richard Wake
2022
Sent into postwar Budapest, Alex tries to map the Communist power structure for the West. The mission gets messier when he is drawn into local grudges, church secrets, and the city's lingering wounds from the war.
The Alpine Pursuit
by Richard Wake
2022
After the war, Alex returns to ruined Vienna and takes work with a new intelligence outfit backed by the Americans. His first mission is personal: track a Gestapo man fleeing through the Alps and settle an old debt.
Conquest
by Richard Wake
2023
Henri La Rue runs the daily business of his Paris crime family, even if his uncle still wears the crown. A land grab around two train stations sparks a gang war that could wreck the family he is trying to hold together.
Escape from Estonia
by Richard Wake
2023
In Tallinn, Alex's job sounds small: watch trains and gather intelligence. But Estonia's shifting loyalties, Soviet pressure, and the shadow of the Forest Brothers pull him into another morally tangled mission.
Power
by Richard Wake
2023
Henri still is not fully in charge, and that is only the start of his problems. As his children step deeper into the business and rivals circle, family strain and street pressure test his judgment.
Rivals
by Richard Wake
2023
Henri expects to inherit the La Rue empire, but the succession plan starts to fray from every side. New relatives, uneasy alliances, and rival interests turn the family business into a fight for control.
Bucharest Unbound
by Richard Wake
2024
Alex is sent to Bucharest to look into a dead Gehlen spy and a shaky anti-Communist operation. Soon he is spying on allies as much as enemies, and the whole arrangement begins to disgust him.
Reunion in Prague
by Richard Wake
2024
Alex returns to Czechoslovakia for the first time since youth, officially to gather intelligence on the Communist regime. Unofficially, he is trying to face the family he left behind, and the past has teeth.
Nightmare in Poland
by Richard Wake
2025
Shaken by a disastrous mission in Krakow, Alex tries to live a quieter life on the Baltic coast. When he gets a chance to learn what really happened, he has to choose between peace and one more dangerous truth.
The Berlin Uprising
by Richard Wake
2025
In 1953 East Berlin, Alex goes undercover as a disillusioned journalist to stir worker anger on Stalinallee. When protest turns into revolt, he is trapped between Soviet force and the people he has helped rouse.
The Nazi Bargain
by Richard Wake
2026
This prequel novella drops the La Rues into occupied Paris during World War II. It sketches the family's older habits of violence, compromise, and survival before the main series moves into the 1950s.
Where should I start?
If you want the full Alex Kovacs story: Vienna at Nightfall → The Spies of Zurich → The Lyon Resistance
If you want Cold War Berlin crime: A Death in East Berlin → In the Shadow of the Wall
If you want postwar espionage first: The Alpine Pursuit → Adrift in Istanbul → Budapest in Pieces
If you want a crime family saga instead of spies: Conquest → Power → Rivals
Author bio
Richard Wake came to fiction after a long stretch in newspapers. Before the novels, he worked as a reporter, columnist, and editor, jobs that train a writer to notice telling details, listen to how people actually talk, and understand how large public events land on ordinary lives. That background shows up all over his fiction. His books move through war, occupation, ideology, and crime, but they stay close to the people caught inside those forces.
Historical fiction, especially stories set in Europe between the world wars and after, was the ambition that stayed with him.
That ambition found its clearest shape in the Alex Kovacs books, the series most readers first meet him through. Alex begins as a traveling salesman tied to his family's mining business, not a born spy and not a glamorous hero. In Vienna at Nightfall and The Spies of Zurich, Wake drops him into the tightening vise of late-1930s Europe, where business trips become intelligence runs and private hesitation starts to look a lot like moral failure. It is a smart way into the period, because Alex is never above the history. He is trapped inside it.
As the series grows, so does Wake's canvas. Books like The Lyon Resistance, Paris in Disguise, The Agony of France, and To Normandy and Beyond follow Alex through occupied France and the Resistance years, then onward into the uneasy postwar world of The Alpine Pursuit, Adrift in Istanbul, and Budapest in Pieces. What keeps these novels moving is not just the espionage. It is Alex's conscience. Wake returns again and again to compromise, grief, divided loyalties, and the bad habit history has of refusing to stay finished.
He likes places where the map is still being argued over.
That instinct also drives the Peter Ritter books. In A Death in East Berlin and In the Shadow of the Wall, Wake shifts from spy fiction to murder investigation, but the core interest is similar: what happens to an ordinary working life when the state grows teeth. Peter is a young East Berlin detective working just before and just after the Berlin Wall goes up. The cases matter, but so do the pressures around them, the Stasi, party politics, private favors, fear, and the constant question of whether staying put is a form of loyalty, weakness, or simple survival.
Then he made a sharp but sensible turn into organized crime. The La Rue novels, beginning with Conquest and continuing through Power and Rivals, move to late-1950s Paris and follow Henri La Rue, a man balancing the daily business of a crime family with the messier business of being a husband, son, father, nephew, and would-be successor. These books are still historical thrillers, but they are looser at the collar and more domestic in their tensions. Family disputes, succession problems, rival gangs, and uneasy alliances do as much damage as bullets. The later prequel novella The Nazi Bargain pushes the family back into occupied Paris and suggests how deep the old compromises go.
Across all three series, Wake seems drawn to people who are not built for slogans. His protagonists are not saints, not masterminds, and not unscarred action figures. They drink too much, second-guess themselves, make compromises, and keep going. Readers who enjoy his work tend to respond to that human scale, along with the steady pacing, the strong sense of place, and the way each book uses history as pressure rather than wallpaper.
He has kept building that world book by book. And the pattern is pretty clear by now: Richard Wake writes about Europe when the ground is shifting, and about the men who have to make choices before they feel ready.
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