The Rift (Douglas E Richards) Books in Order

The Rift trilogy teams Douglas E Richards with Joshua T Calvert to tell a story about parallel Earths, interdimensional war, and the knife edge between scientific discovery and annihilation. It begins decades ago in Antarctica, when two researchers uncover a perfectly smooth black sphere floating in a crater. Both men disappear, and the object becomes a buried mystery.0

By the time of The Rift, reality itself has started to fray. A skyscraper in Manhattan simply vanishes. An airplane appears and crashes in the Sahara in a way that should be physically impossible. Strange artifacts and impossible technologies surface around the globe. Physicist James Barron is pulled into the investigation and comes to a chilling conclusion, a highly advanced parallel Earth is breaching the barrier between realities, testing the defenses of our world before a full invasion.0

The second book finds James still dealing with the aftermath of that first contact. Rifts continue to open, spawning anomalous superstorms and other disasters, while a mysterious nexus left behind at Camp David hovers like a black hole that no one understands. James takes charge of the effort to study it below the presidential compound, driven by equal parts duty and his determination to rescue agent Hannah Walker, who vanished through the portal during the first crisis.0

In The Rift 3, James, Hannah, and their ally Wolf finally reunite on an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire never fell and has had millennia to advance its science and warfare. As ever larger rifts rip open between the worlds and warships cross from one reality to the other, the trio must find a way to stop a superior force while also repairing the torn fabric of existence.0

Across the trilogy, the series blends hard science ideas about dimensions and causality with the pleasures of a big, cinematic thriller. Secret organizations, competing governments, and ancient empires all have agendas, and James is repeatedly forced to improvise under impossible pressure. The Rift books can be read one after another as a single long arc, taking readers from the first small cracks in reality to a final battle that decides the fate of multiple Earths.