Roy Johansen Books in Order

If you want his first solo thrillers: The Answer Man → Beyond Belief → Deadly Visions
If you want the Kendra Michaels series from the start: Close Your Eyes → With Open Eyes → Sight Unseen → The Naked Eye
If you like underwater adventure and buried secrets: Silent Thunder → Shadow Zone → Storm Cycle
If you want the newer Kendra books: Killer View → More Than Meets the Eye → Flashback → Wait and See

Roy Johansen did not come to fiction by a straight line. He started in screenwriting, and that training still shows in his books. The scenes move fast, the stakes arrive early, and even the quieter moments feel built to turn on one sharp detail.

While attending Georgia State University in 1987, he wrote the screenplay Murder 101. It won the national FOCUS award, and the script later became a cable movie starring Pierce Brosnan. In 1992, Johansen and cowriter Bill Condon won an Edgar Award for the project in the television movie or miniseries category.

That was a serious beginning.

From there he worked across film and television, writing projects for Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Disney, and MGM. He also teamed up with Stan Lee to create The Accuser, a superhero character used in an animated series. Long before he became known for thriller novels, he was learning how to build tension in tight, visual scenes.

He has said that screenwriting trained him to think hard about concept and story. Touring with his mother, Iris Johansen, later taught him something else: readers care deeply about character. You can feel that shift in his fiction. The plots move quickly, but the people inside them matter just as much as the twist.

His first novel, The Answer Man, follows a struggling polygraph operator who makes one bad decision and falls into a deadly web of lies. After that came Beyond Belief and Deadly Visions, two thrillers featuring Joe Bailey, a former magician turned Atlanta detective who spends his time exposing fake psychics and then keeps finding himself in cases that seem almost impossible to explain.

Then came his long partnership with Iris Johansen. Together they wrote the Kendra Michaels books, beginning with Close Your Eyes. Kendra is a music therapist who was blind for the first twenty years of her life, and Johansen uses that backstory in a very practical way. Her ear for patterns, her attention to scent and texture, and her habit of noticing what other people miss become the engine of the plot. Books like Sight Unseen, The Naked Eye, Flashback, and Wait and See mix serial killers, conspiracies, and fast clue work with a heroine who is sharp, stubborn, and never easy to fool.

He also collaborated with Iris on the Hannah Bryson novels, including Silent Thunder and Shadow Zone. Those books lean more toward adventure, with submarines, underwater ruins, and secrets that have been buried for a very long time. Even when the setup gets large, his stories usually stay grounded in people under pressure, trying to think one move ahead.

He writes lean.

That may be the simplest way to describe what readers like about his work. Johansen tends to build stories around investigators, skeptics, and problem-solvers. He likes characters who can read a room, spot a lie, or see the one clue everyone else missed. Whether the lead is a polygraph expert, a former magician, or Kendra Michaels reading danger before anyone else does, the pleasure is in watching intelligence collide with risk. These days he lives in southern California with his wife, Lisa. In recent years he has balanced solo work and collaboration, including Killer View, which shifts the spotlight to Jessie Mercado from the Kendra Michaels world, and newer Kendra novels such as More Than Meets the Eye. Across all of it, the appeal is pretty consistent: smart premises, clean plotting, and characters who have to earn every answer.