The America Trilogy Books in Order

The America Trilogy is David B. Lyons’s broadest thriller project. It follows the pull of a major television news operation while moving through the lives of people who do not yet know they are about to become part of a national story. At the center of the wider series is Sarah-Jane Zdanski, a hugely visible television anchor whose show turns private crises into public events.

The first book, In The Middle of Middle America, starts in September 1997 in Lebanon, Kansas, a town marked as the geographic center of the country. A teacher, a soldier, an immigrant, a joker, a loner, a chancer, and a carer each go about an ordinary day. Their lives gradually knot together, and the story’s many viewpoints create the sense that something larger is taking shape just out of sight.

Nobody is watching the whole picture yet.

In The Footage That Shook America, the setting shifts to a Connecticut suburb. Four apparently unconnected people, including experienced officer Nate Bennett and rookie Maggie Zucha, are drawn into a search for footage powerful enough to change the country. It is a story about the value of information, the danger of being watched, and the way a single recording can become a weapon when the wrong person gets hold of it.

The final book, The Murders That Killed America, moves ahead to Washington, D.C., in 2047. Technology has become even more woven into public life, and the country is in trouble. President Sally W. Campbell sees danger approaching, but the series keeps returning to a central question: when the media controls the story people hear, who really holds power?

The trilogy is connected by Zdanski’s show and by its interest in how news is made. It is not simply about reporters chasing headlines. Lyons looks at the people on the other side of the camera, the people whose lives become content, evidence, scandal, or political ammunition. The books use multiple points of view, changing locations and time periods, and an increasingly uneasy relationship between the public and the technology around it.

Expect social suspense rather than a single detective investigation. The stakes grow from personal secrets to national consequences, but the series begins with regular people trying to get through their own complicated lives. Start with In The Middle of Middle America, then read the books in publication order to follow the expanding world of the Zdanski Show.