Jake Tapper Books in Order

If you want the Marder novels in order: The Hellfire Club → The Devil May Dance → All the Demons Are Here
If you want Tapper on war and national security: The Outpost → Race Against Terror
If you want campaign drama and White House reporting: Down and Dirty → Original Sin
If you want his early outsider politics book: Body Slam

Jake Tapper was born in New York and moved to Philadelphia as a baby, growing up mostly in Queen Village and, after his parents divorced, also spending time in Merion. That mix of city politics, neighborhood life, and constant news noise fits the way he writes: people matter, but so do the systems around them.

He did not start out thinking television was the goal.

At Dartmouth, where he studied history with a visual studies component, he wanted to be a political cartoonist. He drew, wrote, and kept chasing the mix of politics and personality that later became one of his trademarks. His comic strip Capitol Hell ran in Roll Call for years, and politics was already more than a spectator sport to him by then.

After college he worked on Capitol Hill and in public relations, but journalism kept pulling harder. A key nudge came from editor David Carr, who encouraged him to leave better-paying PR work for the messier world of reporting. Tapper went on to write for the Washington City Paper, then Salon, building a reputation for sharp political reporting and a willingness to ask awkward follow-up questions.

That habit of sticking with the question became his lane.

ABC News hired him in 2003, and he covered everything from Iraq and Hurricane Katrina to presidential politics and the White House. At ABC he won three straight Merriman Smith awards for White House coverage. He later joined CNN in 2013, where he became a central Washington anchor and interviewer. Viewers know him from The Lead and State of the Union, but the through line is the same one he had in print: keep pressing, keep reporting, keep the conversation moving past the first talking point.

Before the novels, he published early books on Jesse Ventura and the 2000 election, but The Outpost was the book that introduced many readers to his long-form nonfiction. It follows Combat Outpost Keating and the Battle of Kamdesh in Afghanistan, and it was later adapted into a film. Readers often come to it for the military history, then stay for the way he follows individual soldiers and families through chaos, bad planning, and real bravery.

Tapper's fiction pulls those same interests into historical thrillers. The Hellfire Club, The Devil May Dance, and All the Demons Are Here follow the Marder family through 1950s Washington, 1960s Hollywood, and the jittery mood of the 1970s. The books mix invented characters with real public figures, and readers who enjoy them usually like the same things: brisk plotting, period detail, and the sense that politics, celebrity, crime, and private family life are always bumping into each other.

With Original Sin, written with Alex Thompson, he returned to contemporary political reporting and the hidden decisions behind public events. Across both fiction and nonfiction, he comes back again and again to ambition, image-making, institutional failure, and the damage that follows when people close to power stop telling the truth.

He still lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children, and he has kept his cartoonist side alive, too. That feels right. Even in his most serious work, there is usually an eye for the odd little detail, the human vanity, or the bit of theater that makes politics look like politics.