Rick Acker Books in Order

Rick Acker is a suspense writer whose day job gives his fiction a useful dose of real-world pressure. He works as a Supervising Deputy Attorney General for the California Department of Justice, leading a team that prosecutes corporate fraud lawsuits.

He is a transplanted Chicagoan who spent his first thirty-five years in the Midwest. Eventually, he traded winter and mosquitoes for the earthquake and wildfire risks of California.

Before joining the Department of Justice, Acker worked as a senior litigator at Bingham McCutchen. His cases included a multibillion-dollar international fraud matter and a legal fight between two owners of the San Francisco 49ers. He also studied at the University of Oslo and earned his law degree, with honors, from the University of Notre Dame.

That legal background is not just scenery in his novels.

Acker's stories often begin with a lawsuit, a disputed piece of evidence, or a client in real trouble, then widen into questions of science, money, technology, and trust. In Dead Man's Rule, Chicago attorney Ben Corbin takes on a case involving a safe-deposit box and a terrifying biowarfare formula. Blood Brothers sends Ben to Norway, where a fight between pharmaceutical-company siblings turns into a dangerous battle over a powerful drug.

He also writes thrillers that bring new science into the courtroom. Death in the Mind's Eye follows a lawyer defending a psychologist whose experimental therapy is under scrutiny after a patient's death. In The Enoch Effect, insurance litigator Leigh Collins is drawn into a biotech case involving a dead cancer researcher and missing research with enormous implications. These books use complicated professional problems, but the stakes stay personal.

Acker has written for younger readers, too.

His Davis Detective Mysteries follow siblings Kirstin and Arthur Davis, partners in their own detective agency. The Case of the Autumn Rose moves them from everyday school-age cases into an international mystery, while The Lost Treasure of Fernando Montoya gives them a hunt involving dangerous terrain, shark-filled water, and a buried ship. The books show the same interest in clues and momentum in a lighter, younger-reader format.

More recently, Acker has worked with Colleen Coble. Their Tupelo Grove novels center on separated spouses Savannah and Hez Webster, who must face crimes tied to a university, family history, smuggled artifacts, and their damaged marriage. Their standalone I Think I Was Murdered takes a more modern turn, following a widow whose AI chatbot may know the truth about her husband's death.

He writes in the gaps around a demanding legal career, which feels fitting for someone drawn to people making hard decisions under impossible deadlines.

Acker lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Anette. They have four adult children. Along with his fiction and legal work, he has contributed to two legal treatises published by the American Bar Association.