Allan Folsom Books in Order

For the big breakout thriller: The Day After Tomorrow.
For Vatican conspiracy suspense: Day of Confession.
For John Barron/Nicholas Marten in order: The Exile → The Machiavelli Covenant → The Hadrian Memorandum.
For Folsom's core themes: The Day After Tomorrow → The Exile → The Machiavelli Covenant.

Allan Folsom was born Allan Reed Folsom on December 9, 1941, in Orlando, Florida. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, and later studied communications at Boston University, where he graduated in 1963.

He did not come to novels by the short road.

After college, Folsom moved into the working side of film and television in California. He took jobs as a delivery driver, camera operator, film editor, writer, and producer, the kind of mixed bag that teaches a storyteller where the practical problems are. He also wrote for television, with credits that included episodes of Hart to Hart.

For years, he was a screenwriter trying to get projects made. One script about poet Anne Sexton nearly drew interest with Natalie Wood attached, but like many Hollywood almost-stories, it never became the break he needed. The real turn came when he shifted a big, visual thriller idea onto the page as a novel.

That book was The Day After Tomorrow, published in 1994. Before readers even had it in their hands, the manuscript had made news for a huge first-novel deal. Once released, it reached No. 3 on the bestseller list and introduced the kind of story Folsom liked best: an ordinary professional pulled into a violent, international plot that is much bigger than one crime.

He liked scale, but he usually gave readers a person to follow through the chaos.

In The Day After Tomorrow, surgeon Paul Osborn spots the man who killed his father and is pulled into a European conspiracy while detective McVey works a string of brutal murders. Day of Confession moves the action to Rome and Vatican politics, where Hollywood lawyer Harry Addison tries to find out what really happened to his priest brother. The Exile begins the John Barron and Nicholas Marten sequence, turning an LAPD detective's break with his own squad into a chase that reaches across Europe.

Folsom followed that thread with The Machiavelli Covenant and The Hadrian Memorandum, where Marten is up against secret power networks, bioweapons, oil interests, mercenaries, and pressure that reaches the U.S. presidency. Readers who enjoy his books usually come for the pace, the globe-hopping settings, and the sense that every powerful room has another locked door behind it.

His fiction returns often to a few clear ingredients: damaged professionals, family trouble, old crimes, hidden organizations, and institutions that cannot be trusted just because their names sound important. Doctors, lawyers, police officers, priests, presidents, and assassins all share the stage. The plots can get large, but the engine is usually simple: someone learns too much and has to keep moving.

Folsom lived for many years in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife, Karen Glick, whom he married in 1979, and their daughter, Riley. He died there on May 16, 2014, at age 72, from melanoma. He left five novels, all built for readers who like their suspense loud, mobile, and full of trouble.