Ronald H Balson Books in Order

If you want the Liam & Catherine series from book one: Once We Were Brothers → Saving Sophie → Karolina's Twins → The Trust.
If you’re ready for their later, more international cases: The Girl from Berlin → Defending Britta Stein.
If you like intense standalone World War II dramas: Eli's Promise → The Righteous.
If you prefer espionage and resistance stories: An Affair of Spies → A Place to Hide.
If you just want one book to sample his work: Once We Were Brothers.

Ronald H. Balson is an attorney, professor, and novelist based in Chicago whose work bridges modern courtrooms and the landscapes of World War II. Best known for his Liam Taggart and Catherine Lockhart novels and for The Girl from Berlin, a National Jewish Book Award winner, he writes stories where history, law, and memory collide.

Balson has spent decades in civil litigation with a Chicago firm, handling commercial disputes, appeals, arbitrations, and employment cases. His practice has taken him into courts across the United States and Canada and into international venues, working with foreign documents, translators, and cross‑border discovery.

Alongside his trial work, he built a long teaching career. For many years he taught business law at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, and he continues to teach trial advocacy for the federal trial bar, helping younger lawyers learn how to build a clear, honest case.

He studied at Tulane University before earning his J.D. from DePaul University. The mix of classroom teaching, courtroom experience, and a growing fascination with twentieth‑century history turned out to be an unexpected training ground for fiction.

Fiction grew naturally out of that blend of law, travel, and history.

While representing a client in a telecommunications dispute, Balson made repeated trips to Warsaw and towns in southern Poland. In off‑hours he visited museums and former camps and listened to people who had lived through Nazi occupation. Those experiences became the foundation for Once We Were Brothers, in which an elderly Holocaust survivor brings a civil lawsuit in Chicago against a man he insists is a former Nazi officer.

Liam Taggart and Catherine Lockhart, introduced in that book, now anchor a continuing series. Catherine is a Chicago trial lawyer; Liam is a private investigator with deep family ties to Northern Ireland. Together they take on clients whose problems—a custody fight, a property dispute, a defamation case—are rooted in events that unfolded decades earlier in Poland, Italy, Denmark, or the Middle East. Readers follow them through modern legal battles while also stepping back into the lives of the people who survived those earlier years.

Several novels explore different corners of the Second World War and its aftermath. Saving Sophie links an embezzlement case to a kidnapping and a plot in the West Bank. Karolina's Twins draws on the testimony of a woman he met at a book event and follows a survivor’s search for two infants lost during the Holocaust. The Trust returns Liam to his Northern Irish childhood, while The Girl from Berlin and Defending Britta Stein move between contemporary cases and musicians, partisans, and resisters living under fascist regimes.

More recent stand‑alone novels widen the lens. Eli's Promise spans Nazi‑occupied Lublin, a displaced‑persons camp in postwar Germany, and Chicago during the Vietnam era as one man looks for justice after a wartime betrayal. An Affair of Spies follows a young émigré recruited by the Manhattan Project to slip back into Berlin and help prevent a Nazi atomic weapon. A Place to Hide and The Righteous turn to diplomats, underground networks, and ordinary citizens who risked everything to save Jewish families in Western Europe and Hungary.

Across these books, Balson returns to a few constant themes: what it means to keep a promise, how far people will go to protect family, and how legal systems can both fail survivors and offer them a path to be heard. He continues to live and practice law in Chicago, dividing his time between his caseload, research trips, speaking with readers, and the next manuscript on his desk.