Joseph Finder Books in Order
See every Joseph Finder book in order, from Nick Heller to standalones, with quick summaries, an author bio, and tips on the best place to start.
Last updated: December 22, 2025
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Publication Order
23 books
The Oligarch's Daughter
by Joseph Finder
2025
Years after marrying the daughter of a charming Russian billionaire and joining the family’s investment firm, Paul Brightman is hiding in New England under a new name. When assassins finally track him down, he has to survive the hunt and untangle the conspiracy that began with his father‑in‑law’s money.
House on Fire
by Joseph Finder
2020
After an old army buddy dies from an overdose of a blockbuster opioid, Nick Heller is hired by the drug’s manufacturer’s rebellious daughter to find a suppressed study. Infiltrating the powerful Kimball family, he must navigate sibling rivalries and corporate spin to expose the truth.
Judgment
by Joseph Finder
2019
At a conference far from home, respected Boston judge Juliana Brody has a brief affair she assumes will stay secret. Back on the bench she discovers her lover working on a high‑profile case in her courtroom—and shadowy figures threaten to destroy her life if she rules the wrong way.
The Switch
by Joseph Finder
2017
Rushing through airport security, coffee entrepreneur Michael Tanner accidentally picks up a U.S. senator’s laptop loaded with classified files. Once he opens it, returning the machine is as risky as keeping it, and soon he’s being hunted by political fixers and national‑security operatives.
Guilty Minds
by Joseph Finder
2016
Nick Heller is called to Washington when a scandal site prepares to publish a story claiming the chief justice of the Supreme Court hired an escort. With only two days to knock it down, Nick follows the money behind the website and stumbles into murder and political sabotage.
The Fixer
by Joseph Finder
2015
Down‑on‑his‑luck journalist Rick Hoffman retreats to his childhood home and discovers more than three million dollars hidden in a wall. Tracing the cash back to his now‑silent lawyer father and Boston’s old corruption, he finds himself hunted by people who thought that history was safely buried.
The Starling Project: An Audible Drama
by Erica Spindler
2014
Created directly for audio, this full‑cast drama follows war‑crimes investigator Harold Middleton as he tracks the flow of illicit fuel money and a shadowy figure called Starling. With cinematic sound and quick scene changes, the story delivers Deaver’s twists through performances instead of pages.
Suspicion
by Joseph Finder
2014
Single father Danny Goodman accepts a seemingly generous loan from the wealthy father of his daughter’s best friend, just to keep her in an elite school. Moments after the money hits his account, federal agents reveal it belongs to a cartel and force him into spying to stay out of prison.
Good and Valuable Consideration: Jack Reacher vs. Nick Heller
by Lee Child
2014
During a Yankees–Red Sox game in a Boston bar, drifter Jack Reacher and private spy Nick Heller realize the nervous man sitting between them is about to be targeted. What begins as small talk turns into a tight, violent showdown with a crew of would‑be enforcers.
Plan B
by Joseph Finder
2011
In this Nick Heller novella, a teenage girl is being held inside a heavily guarded compound outside Barcelona. Nick’s job is to slip in, extract her, and disappear again, but when the first plan collapses he has to improvise fast inside hostile walls.
Buried Secrets
by Joseph Finder
2011
Back in Boston with his own firm, Nick Heller is hired when a hedge‑fund titan’s teenage daughter is kidnapped and entombed underground, her ordeal streamed online. To find her before time runs out, Nick has to sort genuine ransom threats from the enemies circling her father.
Vanished
by Joseph Finder
2009
When his sister‑in‑law is beaten and his estranged brother disappears from a Georgetown street, private intelligence operative Nick Heller starts asking questions. The search pulls him into the shadowy world of defense contracts and political influence, where family secrets collide with national security.
The Copper Bracelet
by Erica Spindler
2009
Harold Middleton and the Volunteers return when a terrorist plot involving “heavy water” and a mysterious copper bracelet threatens to ignite conflict in South Asia. As different thriller authors take turns advancing the story, Middleton races across continents to identify a faceless mastermind known only as the Scorpion.
The Chopin Manuscript
by Erica Spindler
2007
In this collaborative thriller, conceived and framed by Deaver, former war‑crimes investigator Harold Middleton acquires a rare Chopin score that others are willing to kill for. What seems like a music‑lover’s treasure pulls him into a global chase involving old secrets, new threats and a conspiracy with deadly reach.
Power Play
by Joseph Finder
2007
Junior executive Jake Landry is sent to a remote wilderness lodge with his company’s top brass, where supposedly harmless hunters crash the opening dinner and reveal themselves as hostage‑takers. Cut off from the outside world, Jake’s hidden past becomes the only real leverage the captives have.
Killer Instinct
by Joseph Finder
2006
Salesman Jason Steadman has charm but no edge until he befriends Kurt Semko, a volatile former Special Forces soldier. After Jason gets Kurt hired in corporate security, his rivals suffer a series of accidents and his career soars—until he realizes his new ally has become a lethal problem.
Company Man
by Joseph Finder
2005
Nick Conover, the embattled CEO of a hometown manufacturing giant, is dealing with layoffs, angry locals, and a stalker targeting his children. One desperate night leads to a death he can’t explain away, drawing the police and his own board of directors into a tightening noose.
Paranoia
by Joseph Finder
2003
Twenty‑something tech employee Adam Cassidy is caught pulling an expensive stunt at work and offered a brutal choice: prison, or spying on his company’s biggest rival. Groomed as a rising star inside the competitor, he starts to enjoy the perks even as the lies close in.
High Crimes
by Joseph Finder
1998
Harvard law professor and defense attorney Claire Heller Chapman sees her comfortable life shatter when her husband is arrested as a fugitive accused of a Central American massacre. Taking his case into a secret military court, she uncovers buried combat files and a dangerous cover‑up.
The Zero Hour
by Joseph Finder
1996
Counterterrorism specialist Sarah Cahill is tracking a South African mercenary known as the Prince of Darkness when attacks strike at the heart of Wall Street. As the terrorist turns his sights on her young son, Sarah races to stop a plot built around the global financial system.
Extraordinary Powers
by Joseph Finder
1993
After the CIA director—who is also his father‑in‑law—dies in a suspicious crash, lawyer and former agent Ben Ellison is pulled into a classified program studying telepathy. Hunting an exiled KGB chief and missing Russian gold, he discovers just how corrupt his own side may be.
The Moscow Club
by Joseph Finder
1991
When CIA Kremlinologist Charlie Stone reviews a smuggled tape hinting at a coup inside the Soviet leadership, he stumbles into a frame‑up and an international manhunt. To prove his innocence and stop the plotters, he has to follow the conspiracy back to Moscow.
Red Carpet
by Joseph Finder
1983
Red Carpet explores how a small circle of American business leaders built close relationships with Soviet officials. Drawing on interviews and government files, Finder charts the deals, favors, and back channels that linked Wall Street money to Kremlin power.
Where should I start?
If you want his corporate and tech thrillers: Paranoia → Company Man → Killer Instinct → Power Play
If you prefer an ongoing investigator: Vanished → Buried Secrets → Guilty Minds → House on Fire
If courtroom and moral dilemmas appeal to you: High Crimes → Suspicion → Judgment
If you’re curious about his latest geopolitical story: The Switch → The Oligarch’s Daughter
Author bio
Joseph Finder was born in Chicago in 1958 and spent much of his childhood overseas, with long stretches in Afghanistan and the Philippines before his family settled in Washington State and near Albany, New York. Growing up between cultures during the Cold War gave him an early fascination with borders, power, and what governments choose to keep hidden.
In college he leaned straight into that curiosity. At Yale he majored in Russian studies, graduated summa cum laude, sang bass with the Whiffenpoofs, and spent his free time devouring spy novels. Graduate work at Harvard’s Russian Research Center followed, along with a stint teaching, deepening his expertise in Soviet politics and intelligence.
Along the way he was recruited by the CIA, an offer many thriller writers only get to imagine. The reality turned out to be more bureaucracy than adventure, and he eventually decided he’d rather invent operations than file reports about them. That “almost spy” detour quietly shaped the way he writes about tradecraft and institutions.
In his mid‑twenties Finder wrote Red Carpet, a nonfiction book about the ties between Kremlin officials and a handful of powerful American businessmen. Researching it meant digging through archives, using freedom‑of‑information requests, and sitting down with executives and former operatives. The experience taught him how money, politics, and secrecy mesh—and how dangerous it can be to expose that.
Fiction let him go further. His first novel, The Moscow Club, imagined a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and put a CIA analyst in the crosshairs of both Washington and Moscow. Extraordinary Powers and The Zero Hour followed, blending espionage, cutting‑edge intelligence programs, and high‑risk manhunts with the moral ambiguity that runs through real‑world covert work.
Over time his focus widened from spies to boardrooms and courtrooms. High Crimes put a Harvard law professor in a secret court‑martial and became a film with Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. Paranoia, about a tech employee forced into corporate espionage, also reached the big screen, while novels like Company Man, Killer Instinct, and Power Play turned hostile takeovers and executive retreats into life‑and‑death battles.
Finder also wanted a recurring hero. In Vanished he introduced Nick Heller, a former Special Forces operator turned “private spy” who digs up secrets for clients who can’t—or won’t—go to the authorities. The Nick Heller books, including Buried Secrets, Guilty Minds, and House on Fire, move between Washington, Boston, and global hotspots, tying family loyalties to political scandal and corporate crime.
Recent standalones such as Suspicion, The Fixer, The Switch, Judgment, and The Oligarch’s Daughter keep circling the same pressure points: surveillance, financial risk, the temptation to cut one ethical corner and then another. His protagonists are rarely superheroes. They’re journalists, judges, salespeople, or small‑business owners who discover, often too late, how much power someone else holds over their lives.
Finder is a founding member of International Thriller Writers and has written about espionage and security for major newspapers and magazines. He lives in the Boston area, roots for the Red Sox, and still draws on his early academic work whenever he sketches out a new conspiracy. The result is a body of thrillers that move fast but stay grounded in how institutions, and the people inside them, really behave.
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