Richard Yancey Books in Order

If you want alien invasion and big stakes: The 5th Wave → The Infinite Sea → The Last Star
If you want gothic horror: The Monstrumologist → The Curse of the Wendigo → The Isle of Blood → The Final Descent
If you want fast Arthurian adventure: The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp → The Seal of Solomon → The Thirteenth Skull
If you want quirky detective fiction: The Highly Effective Detective → The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs → The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool → The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line
If you want the real-life backstory: Confessions of a Tax Collector

Richard Yancey, often published as Rick Yancey, was born in Miami in 1962, was adopted a few days later, and grew up in Lakeland, Florida. He has said he wanted to be a writer from an early age, long before he had a publishing deal or a clear path toward one.

He started writing in grade school.

As a kid and teenager, he read heavily in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, and he has singled out Sherlock Holmes as a lasting favorite. He began writing in the fifth grade, and one of his early pieces made it into his high school literary magazine. That mix of big imagination and tight story mechanics still shows up in his books, which often pair wild premises with very direct, propulsive plotting.

His route through school was not especially straight. He attended Lakeland High School, started college at Florida Southern, transferred to Florida State, and later moved to Chicago to pursue theater before finishing a degree in English at Roosevelt University. That theater interest stayed with him. He wrote screenplays, thought hard about scene structure, and developed the brisk, visual pacing that later became part of his fiction.

Before writing full time, Yancey did a little of everything. He taught part time, worked in and around theater, and held a string of regular jobs, including typesetter, convenience store manager, production line worker, newspaper critic, and finally revenue officer for the Internal Revenue Service. He has said that it was during his IRS years that he met his wife, started a family, and began writing seriously.

That tax job changed his career.

His early published books were for adults, not teens. A Burning in Homeland, his 2003 debut novel, is a Southern Gothic story set in Florida. It was followed by the memoir Confessions of a Tax Collector, drawn from his years inside the IRS. The memoir did well enough that he left the agency in 2004 and committed to writing full time.

A lot of readers first met him through The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, which turns Arthurian legend into a modern adventure about an unlikely teenage hero. He also wrote the Teddy Ruzak mysteries for adults, comic private-eye novels with a sweet, shambling detective at the center. Yancey does not stay in one mode for long, but he keeps returning to outsiders, reluctant heroes, and people who are in over their heads.

His biggest young adult breakthrough came with The Monstrumologist and The 5th Wave. The Monstrumologist, a dark historical horror novel about Will Henry and Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, received a Michael L. Printz Honor, and its sequel The Curse of the Wendigo was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The 5th Wave brought him to a wider audience with its alien invasion story, its shifting teen viewpoints, and later a 2016 film adaptation. Readers tend to come to Yancey for pace, dread, sharp turns, and characters who keep going even when the world gets very strange.

He has long lived in Florida with his wife, Sandy, and their family. That contrast between ordinary home life and extraordinary danger feels very much in line with his fiction. His books jump from tax offices to haunted laboratories to the end of the world, but the through line is clear: he likes taking regular people, or people who think they are regular, and seeing what happens when the floor drops out from under them.