Derek Haas Books In Order

Publication Order of Silver Bear Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Derek Haas
Author Derek Haas was born in the United States in 1970. Besides writing novels, he has written or co-written some screenplays, and is the editor and creator of popcornfiction.com. He is also the co-creator of the television series “Chicago Fire”.

“Columbus” was nominated for a Barry Award for Best Thriller Novel in the year 2010.

Derek’s debut novel, called “The Silver Bear”, was released in the year 2008. His work is from the thriller and mystery genres.

“The Right Hand” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2012. Meet Austin Clay, the best-kept secret of the CIA.

There has always been a need within the spy game for operations outside the realm of legailty. These are covert missions so black that nobody in the American government, and just about nobody in intelligence itself, is aware of it even existing. The left hand must never know what the right hand is doing.

Austin Clay is this right hand, carrying out missions that would be disavowed by his government were he to be compromised. His team consists of just his trusted handler and himself. His missions are among some of the most important and dangerous in all of US history.

Clay is sent off to find a missing American operative, a guy that was captured right outside of Moscow, out in the Russian countryside. Quickly, he finds the missing officer is just the start of this mission, and finds that he is protecting this one desperate woman. She believes a mole has penetrated the top levels of the American government, throwing the whole international balance of power right into jeopardy.

Derek has created a lean and mean story that is laced with mordant insight, wit, and (at perfectly timed moments) flashes of sharp prose. He has also paced this story with crack action sequences, and they never detract from his canny plotting.

“The Silver Bear” is the first novel in the “Silver Bear” series and was released in the year 2008. The intense psychological portrait of an assassin, while he stalks his prey from Boston to Los Angeles. The guy wants you to know him, maybe even admire him, but just for his excellence in his craft. Possibly, he was even born for it. His mentor (a middleman called Vespucci) called him a natural killer.

He proved it when doing his first professional hit: Fifth Circuit Court judge in Boston, executed with a sheet of Saran Wrap in the stairwell in her own courthouse. The guy has proved his merit often, usually using a Glock semiautomatic, however, he has improvised as well, with his bare hands, knives, the heel of a shoe, and even using a sewing machine. The man is the consummate hitman, at the top of his form, immune to the psychological strains of this chosen profession.

He is what the Russians refer to as a Silver Bear. He refers to himself as Columbus. This is the name Vespucci gave to him a decade prior, when he found a dark and new world of fences, marks, clients, jobs, and jack. Not that his real name meant too much to him. He never knew his parents, like his mom who was a hooker that became dangerously involved during the seventies with an earnest and young congressman called Abe Mann, who was then a rising star with the Democratic Party.

Abe Mann has gone on to become the Speaker of the House. He currently runs for the Democratic nomination in his exhaustive campaign for president, where he weaves his way across the country. Columbus isn’t too far behind. While he pieces his past together and gets the seamless assassination of his mark read, the criminal underworld that he has always ruled crumbles violently all around him.

Readers found this to be a swift and tight debut thriller novel. Derek is able to layer on novelistic texture by telling this story from the perspective of the hitman. This is a lean work, with each word adding up and counting for more than most authors land in using double the space.

“Columbus” is the second novel in the “Silver Bear” series and was released in the year 2009. Columbus has returned and is just as lethal as ever. Now the hunter has become the hunted. The guy told you not to like him. To get close to the Silver Bear, Columbus, means dying. Exactly whose death is to be determined.

Columbus, who recoups in Europe after he lost his fence and his best friend during his mission in order to kill his dad, now finds his reverie being interrupted by more than one hitman hunting for the ever elusive Silver Bear. While Columbus takes out each hired killer, more show up, a hydra effect he can only eliminate by locating the origin of the hit. One that comes from his own past.

Racing all over the globe, as both the hunted and hunter, Columbus’ journey takes him to Italy. Here he meets Risina, a mysterious lady. She is a woman with her own secret past, and she may just be Columbus’ only hope for salvation.

Columbus is a thoroughly likable villain, operating with his own moral code, his own special sense of compassion, and on the wrong side of the law.

“Dark Men” is the third novel in the “Silver Bear” series and was released in the year 2011. Columbus is now retired. So he thinks, anyway. He and Risina, his lover, an enigmatic rare-book dealer, have fled to a small Italian coastal village where nobody knows their names. Yet Columbus still has trouble letting go.

His paranoia is actually justified when, one day, he spots a suspicious guy following him. In just days he is back in Chicago attempting to figure out why his old fence has been abducted and possibly killed. The ransom note left behind demands Columbus specifically.

The Silver Bear has to now sever this final link with his dark past if Risina and he are to ever make a new life together. Yet Risina appears to show a remarkable knack for the kill herself. And perhaps there isn’t going to be a chance for turning back.