Alex Berenson Books in Order

Berenson was born in New York and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. In 1994, he earned bachelor’s degrees in history and economics from Yale University. He began working as a business reporter for the Denver Post in June 1994. Next, Berenson worked as a business investigative reporter for The New York Times in December 1999, where he covered the Iraq War between the fall of 2003 and the summer of 2004, as well as the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry and issues involving dangerous drugs.

He is the author of twelve spy novels all of which feature the same protagonist, CIA agent John Wells. His debut novel, The Faithful Spy, was published in 2006 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American author. The Faithful Spy debuted at number one on the New York Times paperback bestseller list in 2008.

Berenson left the Times in 2010 to pursue a career as a full-time novelist. He and his wife, Dr. Jacqueline A. Berenson, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University, live in Manhattan with their two dogs.

Alex Berenson Books in order 

John Wells

1. The Faithful Spy (2006)
2. The Ghost War (2008)
3. The Silent Man (2009)
4. The Midnight House (2010)
5. The Secret Soldier (2011)
6. The Shadow Patrol (2012)
7. The Night Ranger (2013)
8. The Counterfeit Agent (2014)
9. Twelve Days (2015)
10. The Wolves (2016)
11. The Prisoner (2017)
12. The Deceivers (2018)

Standalone Novel

1. The Power Couple (2021)
2. The Number (2003)
3. Lost in Kandahar (2011)
4. The Prince of Beers (2012)
5. Tell Your Children (2019)
6. Pandemia (2021)

Unreported Truth

1. Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1 (2020)
2. Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 2 (2020)
3. Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 3: Masks (2020)
4. Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 4: Vaccines (2021)

Similar authors

• Ben Coes’s Dewey Andreas series tells the story of a former Army Ranger and Delta and his fight against a secret terrorist group. The series spans 8 books. See Dewey Andreas Books in Order.
• Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series follows a gifted college athlete looking for retribution after the Pan Am Lockerbie attack. The series currently consists of 21 books. After Flynn died in 2013, the series was continued by Kyle Mills.

See also: Gabriel Allon Books in Order.

Most recommended books

1. The Prisoner (John Wells, #11) (Goodreads score: 4.20)
2. The Deceivers (John Wells, #12) (Goodreads score: 4.20)
3. The Secret Soldier (John Wells, #5) (Goodreads score: 4.15)
4. The Shadow Patrol (John Wells, #6) (Goodreads score: 4.12)
5. Twelve Days (John Wells, #9)  (Goodreads score: 4.08)

Awards

In 2007, Alex Berenson earned the Edgar Award for Best First Novel for his book ‘The Faithful Spy.’

Latest releases

Alex Berenson’s latest books are mostly non-fiction works. In 2021, he published books revolving around the Coronavirus. Some of them are Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives, and Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns.

In 2022, he published The Power Couple, a fictional thriller novel about marriage and the dangerous secrets spouses keep.

Book summaries

The Faithful Spy (2006)

John Wells is the only American CIA agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda. Since before the attacks in 2001, Wells has been hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, biding his time, building his cover.Now, on the orders of Omar Khadri–the malicious mastermind plotting more al Qaeda strikes on America–Wells is coming home. Neither Khadri nor Jennifer Exley, Wells’s superior at Langley, knows quite what to expect.For Wells has changed during his years in the mountains. He has become a Muslim. He finds the United States decadent and shallow. Yet he hates al Qaeda and the way it uses Islam to justify its murderous assaults on innocents. He is a man alone, and the CIA–still reeling from its failure to predict 9/11 or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–does not know whether to trust him. Among his handlers at Langley, only Exley believes in him, and even she sometimes wonders. And so the agency freezes Wells out, preferring to rely on high-tech means for gathering intelligence.But as that strategy fails and Khadri moves closer to unleashing the most devastating terrorist attack in history, Wells and Exley must somehow find a way to stop him, with or without the government’s consent.

The Ghost War (2008)

John Wells barely survived his homecoming when it was thought he’d become too close to the terrorists. Though his wounds have healed, his mind is far from clear. He needs to get back in the fight. And there is a fight waiting for him. A power play in China is causing chaos around the globe. And even as Wells does what he does best, a mole within the CIA is preparing to light the final fuse that will propel an unsuspecting world toward open war and annihilation. And this time, there may be nothing John Wells can do to stop it…

The Silent Man (2009)

For CIA operative John Wells, the underworld has become more real than the real world. He’s spent years in the close company of evil men. And he’s paid the price in every possible way. Now, he’s on the ragged edge of burnout. His nights are plagued by twisted dreams. He’s beginning to doubt if he can ever live a normal life—and he’s right to think so.When a power adversary from Wells’s past finds him, he must once again enter the fray. For his country. For his soul. For revenge….

The Midnight House (2010)

One morning, a former CIA agent is shot to death in the street. That night, an army vet is gunned down in his doorway. The next day, John Wells gets a phone call. Come to Langley. Now.The victims were part of an interrogation team that operated out of a secret base in Poland called the Midnight House, where they worked over the toughest jihadis, extracting information by any means necessary. Now Wells must find out who is killing them. Islamic terrorists are the likeliest suspects, and Wells is uniquely qualified to go undercover and find them. But the trail of blood leads him to a place he couldn’t have imagined: Home.

The Secret Soldier (2011)

In Saudi Arabia, a series of terrorist attacks has put the Kingdom on edge. King Abdullah is losing his hold, and his own secret police cannot be trusted. With nowhere to turn, the king asks for ex-CIA agent John Wells’s help.Reluctantly, and with the secret blessing of his former CIA boss, Wells begins to unravel the conspiracy, and realizes that there is more than one country at stake-because the plotters want more than the fall of a monarch. They want to start the final battle between America and Islam-with only themselves as the victors…

The Shadow Patrol (2012)

In late 2009, CIA officers in Afghanistan’s Kabul station allowed a Jordanian doctor into their closest confidence. In truth, the doctor was an al-Qaeda double agent—and when he blew himself up, the station’s most senior officers died with him. Years later, the station still hasn’t recovered. Recruiting has dried up and the agency’s best Afghani sources are being eliminated. At Langley, the CIA’s chiefs begin to suspect the worst: somehow, the Taliban has infiltrated the station. When they ask John Wells to investigate, he reluctantly agrees. One thing is certain: Americans are dying, and an American is responsible. Wells is the only one who can unearth the truth—if it doesn’t bury him first…

The Night Ranger (2013)

When four young volunteers in Kenya decide to take a break from working at a Somali refugee camp, they pile into a Land Cruiser for an adventure. But they get more than they bargained for when they are kidnapped. They wake up in a hut, hooded, bound, no food or water. Hostages.John Wells is asked to try to find them, but he does so reluctantly. East Africa isn’t his usual playing field. And when he arrives, he finds that the truth behind the kidnappings is far more complex than he imagined.The clock is ticking and the White House is edging closer to an invasion of Somalia. Wells has a unique ability to go undercover and stir things up, but if he can’t find the hostages soon, they’ll be dead—and the U.S. may be in a war it never should have begun.

The Counterfeit Agent (2014)

In an Istanbul hotel, a deep source warns a CIA agent that Iran intends to kill a CIA station chief. Quickly, John Wells is called in to investigate, but before he can get far, the tip comes true. Which means that the next warning the source gives will be taken very seriously indeed. And it’s a big one. We’ve put a package on a ship from Dubai to the United States. A radioactive one. A bomb? Not yet. It’s a test run.As the threat level jumps and the government mobilizes, something still doesn’t smell right to Wells’s old CIA boss Ellis Shafer, and so he sends Wells on a private mission to find out what’s going on. But the two of them are swimming against the tide. From Guatemala to Thailand to Hong Kong to Istanbul, Wells uses every skill he has, including his ability to go undercover in the Arab world, to chase down leads. But it might not be enough. Soon there might be nothing anyone can do to pull the United States back from the brink of war.

Twelve Days (2015)

Wells, with his former CIA bosses Ellis Shafer and Vinnie Duto, has uncovered a staggering plot, a false-flag operation to convince the President to attack Iran. But they have no hard evidence, and no one at Langley or the White House will listen.Now the President has set a deadline for Iran to give up its nuclear program, and the mullahs in Tehran—furious and frightened—have responded with a deadly terrorist attack. Wells, Shafer, and Duto know they have only twelve days to find the proof they need. They fan out, from Switzerland to Saudi Arabia, Israel to Russia, desperately trying to tease out the clues in their possession. Meanwhile, the United States is moving soldiers and Marines to Iran’s border. And Iran has mobilized its own squad of suicide bombers.And as the days tick by and the obstacles mount, they realize that everything they do may not be enough…

The Wolves (2016)

John Wells has just barely managed to stop an operation designed to drive the United States and Iran into war, but the instigator himself disappeared behind an impenetrable war of security. Now it’s time for him to pay, and Wells has made it his personal mission. There are plenty of crosscurrents at work, though. The White House doesn’t want anybody stirring the pot; his old CIA bosses have their own agendas; other countries are starting to sniff around, sensing something unusual. It is when Russia and China enter the mix, however, that the whole affair is set to combust. With alarming speed, Wells is once again on his own…and the wolves are closing in.

The Prisoner (2017)

It is the most dangerous mission of John Wells’s career.Evidence is mounting that someone high up in the CIA is doing the unthinkable—passing messages to ISIS, alerting them to planned operations. Finding out the mole’s identity without alerting him, however, will be very hard, and to accomplish it, Wells will have to do something he thought he’d left behind forever. He will have to reassume his former identity as an al Qaeda jihadi, get captured, and go undercover to befriend an ISIS prisoner in a secret Bulgarian prison.Many years before, Wells was the only American agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda, but times have changed drastically. The terrorist organizations have multiplied: gotten bigger, crueler, more ambitious and powerful. Wells knows it may well be his death sentence. But there is no one else.

The Deceivers (2018)

It was supposed to be a terrorist sting. The guns were supposed to be disabled. Then why was there so much blood?The target was the American Airlines Center, the home of the Dallas Mavericks. The FBI had told Ahmed Shakir that his drug bust would go away if he helped them, and they’d supply all the weaponry, carefully removing the firing pins before the main event. It never occurred to Ahmed to doubt them, until it was too late.When John Wells is called to Washington, he’s sure it’s to investigate the carnage in Dallas, but it isn’t. The former CIA director, now president, Vinnie Duto has plenty of people working in Texas. He wants Wells to go to Colombia. An old asset there has information to share–and it will lead Wells to the deadliest mission of his life, an extraordinary confluence of sleeper cells, sniper teams, false flag operations, double agents high in the U.S. government–and a Russian plot to take over the government itself. If it succeeds, what happened in Texas will be only a prelude.

The Power Couple (2021)

Rebecca and Brian Unsworth appear to have it all. A nice house in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Two well-behaved, healthy teenage children. Important government jobs—Rebecca working in counterterrorism for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Brian serving as a coder for the National Security Agency. Their lives stand to improve even more as Brian, in his off-hours, has just developed and sold a highly profitable app.However, the Unsworths’ marriage isn’t as perfect as it seems. After two decades together, they’ve drifted apart, talking little and having sex even less. Seeking to revive their strained relationship, they decide for their twentieth wedding anniversary to take their two kids, Kira and Tony, on a European getaway.They have a blast…until one night in Barcelona when Kira doesn’t come home from a dance club. She’s gone. Abducted. Over the course of a single weekend, the Unsworths will do everything possible to find her—as Kira herself discovers just how far she’ll go to break free of the trap that’s been set for her. And even as Rebecca and Brian come together for Kira, they realize their marriage is more tenuous than they realized.

The Number (2003)

Every three months, 14,000 publicly traded companies report sales and profits to their shareholders. Nothing is more important in these quarterly announcements than earnings per share, the lodestar that investors—and these days, that’s most of us—use to judge the health of corporate America. earnings per share is the number for which all other numbers are sacrificed. It is the distilled truth of a company’s health.Too bad it’s often a lie.

Lost in Kandahar (2011)

The gripping non-fiction tale of how the United States is spending $100 billion a year on a war that even the men on the front lines can’t explain.

The Prince of Beers (2012)

August Busch IV had everything – or seemed to. In 2006, Busch became the chief executive of Anheuser-Busch, the sixth member of his family to control the legendary brewery. At age 42, Busch was handsome, wealthy, married to a beautiful woman, and running one of the biggest companies in America. Two years later, Busch lost control of Anheuser-Busch. Soon he was jobless, divorced, and struggling with alcohol and drugs. Then he woke to find his girlfriend, a waitress named Adrienne Martin, dead in his bed.

Tell Your Children (2019)

Recreational marijuana is now legal in nine states. Almost all Americans believe the drug should be legal for medical use. Advocates argue cannabis can help everyone from veterans to cancer sufferers. But legalization has been built on myths– that marijuana arrests fill prisons; that most doctors want to use cannabis as medicine; that it can somehow stem the opiate epidemic; that it is not just harmless but beneficial for mental health. In this meticulously reported book, Alex Berenson explodes those myths:• Almost no one is in prison for marijuana;• A tiny fraction of doctors write most authorizations for medical marijuana, mostly for people who have already used;• Marijuana use is linked to opiate and cocaine use. Since 2008, the US and Canada have seen soaring marijuana use and an opiate epidemic. Britain has falling marijuana use and no epidemic;• Most of all, THC—the chemical in marijuana responsible for the drug’s high—can cause psychotic episodes. After decades of studies, scientists no longer seriously debate if marijuana causes psychosis.Psychosis brings violence, and cannabis-linked violence is spreading. In the four states that first legalized, murders have risen 25 percent since legalization, even more than the recent national increase. In Uruguay, which allowed retail sales in July 2017, murders have soared this year.Berenson’s reporting ranges from the London institute that is home to the scientists who helped prove the cannabis-psychosis link to the Colorado prison where a man now serves a thirty-year sentence after eating a THC-laced candy bar and killing his wife. He sticks to the facts, and they are devastating.With the US already gripped by one drug epidemic, this book will make readers reconsider if marijuana use is worth the risk.

Pandemia (2021)

The most important fact about the coronavirus pandemic that turned the world upside down in 2020 is that our response to it has been an epic overreaction driven by a disastrous confluence of public and private interests—all of them purporting to “follow the science.”Since the lockdowns began, millions of Americans have relied on the reporting of Alex Berenson. Exposing the hysteria and manipulation behind the worst failure of public policy since World War I, this clear-eyed journalist has been a critical source of reason and truth.The product of relentless investigation and research, Pandemia explains how an illness that many people will never even know they had became the occasion for economically ruinous lockdowns and the suppression of personal freedom on a previously unimaginable scale. Dispassionate, factual, and untainted by any agenda other than telling the truth, this is the account that pandemic-weary Americans desperately need.

Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1 (2020)

Drawing on primary sources from all over the world – including state and national-level government data, Centers for Disease Control reports, and papers in prominent scientific journals – Unreported Truths offers clear, concise, and measured answers to some of the most important questions around the coronavirus:How are Covid deaths counted?How many Americans are likely to die in a worst-case scenario?What is the evidence that lockdowns do or do not help reduce the spread of the illness?Are masks an effective way to reduce the spread?Why did the forecasts for coronavirus hospitalizations prove so wrong?Are children at serious risk from coronavirus?What has the mental health impact of lockdowns been?Whether you have been skeptical of the media’s panicked reporting all along or are just starting to wonder why the predictions of doom from March and April have not come to pass, Unreported Truths will provide you with the factual, accurate, and impeccably sourced information you need.

Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 2 (2020)

While Unreported Truths Part 1 focused on how many people are dying from COVID-19, this section discusses an equally important but even more complex topic: the history of lockdowns, and the evidence that they work as intended. Like Part 1, this section draws on primary sources like Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization reports, along with news articles, government documents, and scientific papers.In three chapters, this section explains the surprising scientific debate around lockdowns before March, along with the evidence that they did or did not work as intended to reduce the spread of the coronavirus and save lives. If you have been wondering whether lockdowns made any difference – as the media has loudly insisted – Part 2 will give you the truthful, accurate and well-sourced information you need to make up your own mind.

Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 3: Masks (2020)

For months, public health experts have proclaimed, “My mask protects you, while yours protects me.” Governments all over the world now make people wear face coverings in public. But the proof that masks do any good is far weaker than almost anyone understands.Like Parts 1 and 2, this section draws on primary sources like Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization reports, along with news articles, government documents, and scientific papers. It will give you a new perspective on whether masks work – and the truthful and accurate information you need as the debate over mask requirements rages on.

Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 4: Vaccines (2021)

When Pfizer and Moderna announced in November that their mRNA vaccines had cut coronavirus infections by 95 percent with few side effects, the world rejoiced. But in the months since, the truth has proven to be far more complex. Countries like Israel and Britain have seen sharp short-term spikes in coronavirus cases and deaths following the beginning mass vaccination campaigns, and many people have reported severe side effects after being vaccinated.Yet media outlets and public health authorities have largely ignored any potential risks as they encourage everyone, even young people at almost no risk from Covid, to be vaccinated. Berenson offers a more nuanced perspective, explaining both the risks and benefits of the new Covid vaccines – with a focus on the risks, since those have not been covered.Like earlier Unreported Truths booklets, Part 4 draws on verifiable and checkable sources, including government documents, scientific papers, and news articles. It will give you a new perspective on the pros and cons of these new vaccines – and the truthful and accurate information you will not find anywhere else.