Ross Thomas Books in Order

At Mac's Place in Bonn, bar owner Mac McCorkle knows better than to ask where his partner Michael Padillo keeps disappearing to. But when Padillo asks for help, Mac steps into a blind Cold War mission.

Mac McCorkle thinks he has escaped Bonn and started a quieter life in Washington. Then terrorists kidnap his wife to force Michael Padillo into an assassination plot, and the past comes roaring back.

Southern political operator Clinton Shartelle is hired to run an election in a newly independent African nation. Campaign tricks, outside money, and CIA meddling turn a consulting job into sharp-edged chaos.

Philip St. Ives makes his living brokering quiet returns of stolen property. When an African shield vanishes from a Washington museum, a routine handoff turns into a much deadlier game.

Former stuntman Edward Cauthorne thinks a deadly accident in Singapore ended one man's life and his own career. Years later he learns the dead man may be alive, and the search drags him back into danger.

This nonfiction book looks at the early VISTA program and the people trying to fight poverty through volunteer service. It traces the hopes, arguments, and real-world complications behind a major Great Society effort.

Freshly fired spy Lucifer Dye is hired to corrupt a Gulf Coast city already soaked in vice. The job becomes a darkly funny campaign of municipal rot, double-dealing, and personal reckoning.

When a deeply disliked American ambassador is kidnapped in Yugoslavia, Philip St. Ives is pulled in to arrange the exchange. The job leads behind the Iron Curtain and into a nest of Washington secrets.

Mac McCorkle and Michael Padillo are asked to help twin bodyguards after a Saudi prince's Washington deal goes wrong. Soon killers are closing in, and every move looks like the wrong one.

St. Ives arrives at a late-night handoff carrying $90,000 and finds the thief dead behind a washing machine. Suddenly he is not just the go-between, he is the prime suspect and the next target.

Donald Cubbin has spent years climbing to the top of a powerful union, and now an election could finish him. With old grudges surfacing and a killer in play, labor politics turn lethal.

A senator takes a bribe he does not need, and the scandal refuses to die. As Deek Lewis and a relentless columnist dig deeper, they find a much uglier Washington story underneath.

Philip St. Ives heads to London to help a retired con man recover a stolen painting. Before long he is drugged, arrested, and stuck in a case where nobody's story can be trusted.

A rare copy of Pliny disappears on its way from the Library of Congress, and so does the detective guarding it. St. Ives follows the ransom trail into a chilly Washington full of collectors and traps.

Former political fixer Harvey Longmire is pulled off his farm to investigate the disappearance of Arch Mix for a conspiracy-hunting foundation. Old dirty tricks, old friends, and fresh danger make the case anything but academic.

Artie Wu and Quincy Durant stumble into a Southern California caper involving buried Vietnam money and a missing member of an Ozark singing trio. The setup is odd, but the danger gets real in a hurry.

Just after World War II, former OSS man Minor Jackson teams with the crafty Romanian dwarf Nicolae Ploscaru. Together they chase an assassin targeting ex-Nazis, in a thriller built on suspicion, wit, and uneasy partnership.

After Libyan radicals hijack and kidnap the president's brother, only Chubb Dunjee is trusted to negotiate. He is famous for solving impossible political problems, but this time the kidnappers do not want money, they want blood.

Political fundraiser Draper Haere chases the truth behind a right-wing coup in Central America, hoping to use it in a presidential race. Instead he finds traffickers, generals, corrupt officials, and a story that can get him killed.

Benjamin Dill returns to his Texas hometown after his homicide-detective sister is killed in a car bombing. As he hunts her murderer, he finds a town thick with old grudges, corruption, and ugly surprises.

Booth Stallings, an aging terrorism expert, gets swept into a sprawling scheme that reaches from Washington to the Philippines. Artie Wu and Quincy Durant help turn political freelance work into a high-stakes caper.

A slim collection of Ross Thomas pieces on spies, politics, writing, and the news business. It offers a quick look at the sharp, amused intelligence that runs through his fiction.

Durango is a sanctuary town for people hiding from the enemies they made elsewhere. When a former chief justice arrives, Kelly Vines walks into a sly, funny tangle of murders, bargains, and shifting loyalties.

The death of an aging spy sets off a scramble for memoirs packed with Cold War secrets. Mac McCorkle and Michael Padillo step into the fight, where old loyalties matter almost as much as the manuscript.

Artie Wu and Quincy Durant head to Malibu when actress Ione Gamble is found beside her ex-fiance's corpse. What begins as damage control quickly turns into murder, blackmail, and a hunt for dangerous tapes.

When ninety-two-year-old power broker Crawdad Gilmore is murdered before revealing a secret, millionaire investigator Jake Pope starts asking questions. The trail leads through Washington privilege to a scheme aimed at the wheat market.

Edd Twodees Partain, a disgraced Army intelligence officer, is hired to recover stolen hush money. What looks like a grubby cash job opens onto buried secrets from covert wars and the men trying to erase them.