Mike Cooper Books In Order

Publication Order of Silas Cade Books

Publication Order of Mike Cooper Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Mike Wiecek Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

Mike Cooper is the pseudonym of Mike Wiecek, an award-winning author best known for writing popular international thrillers. As Wiecek, he has won several awards the most prestigious of which was the nomination for the Shamus Award for his short stories and a nomination for the ITW’s nomination for “Exit Strategy”. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Cooper never wanted to be a writer from a very young age. In his younger years, he wanted to be an astronaut, a scientist, and a police officer. He was born in Boston but his family moved around a lot from Boston to New Hampshire, to Wisconsin before finally settling in Missouri.

Most made for book parts of Mike Cooper’s biography happened long before he became a writer. He grew up in Missouri and for his bachelors went to Brown University before he proceeded for his masters in finance at MIT’s Sloan School. Probably because of the many wanderings of his family, Cooper developed a wanderlust and would live abroad for several years after finishing his college studies. He spent several years hitchhiking across several Asia countries, particularly countries of the Pacific Rim while he held a job in Japan. Much of the time, he was in Asia he spent working in Tokyo, Japan where he taught English and later on as an editor at Fusosha Publishing where he worked for a small salary. Given that he earned very little money from his teaching and editing jobs, he travelled for the most part on the cheap in what is known in Indonesia as “goat class”. In his travels through Northeast Asia he has climbed Mt. Kinabalu in Borneo, backpacked across Tasmania, travelled overland to Tibet, and taken a freighter to Bora Bora.

Once he got the wanderlust out of his system in his early thirties, he came back home to settle in Boston. In Boston, he worked as an EMT for an emergency division, started bicycling, and joined the food co-op before he got a job as a finance executive for several companies. He went on to work for Oki Electric the Japanese firm, and later moved to Fidelity Insurance as a finance director. During this time, he got married, quit his job, and became a stay at home husband when his daughter was about four months old, to allow his wife build her career. With so much time on his hands now that his children were in school, he decided to dabble in writing and found that he was enjoyed it a lot. After spending more than a decade outside the workplace, he decided that the 9-5 grind was no longer for him and opted to pursue a full time writing career. He would write his first novel “Clawback” in the Silas Cade series and has never looked back since. The writing gives him something to do when he is not at the playground with his children, cooking or procrastinating. He currently lives in a small close-knit community in Boston with his wife and two children.

Mike Coopers “Silas Cade” series of novels are about the protagonist Silas Cade. Cade is an Iraqi War veteran and former black ops operative who takes private contracts from the biggest investors and fund managers of New York City who need his special skills in doing jobs that require utmost precision and secrecy. Silas Cade first appears in some of Cooper’s very first short stories as a hit man accountant. The 2008 crisis on Wall Street and the world financial markets meltdown is what led to the development of the character as he is in the Silas Cade series of novels. His agent loved the idea of the hit man who takes out the crooked Wall Street elites rather than bail them out and it was not long before the novel was published. Going beyond the usual hit man for pay, the novel exposes the dark underbelly of the financial institutions such as the investment banks, the brokers, and major investors who control the markets using underhanded dealings. The novels provide a deeper look into gilded corruption, vast criminal enterprise, rotten villains, and venal deeds of Wall Street. The novels have a playful treatment of the themes interspersed with dark humor and cynicism that is inherent in the bankster culture.

“Clawback” the first novel in the series introduces Silas Cade an accountant and ex black ops operative who does the necessary quietly and quickly, under the employ of the Wall Street fat cats. Silas is enlisted to go demand clawback from a top hedge fund manager whose deal had gone bad. Using his special skills, Cade manages to get the manager to pay up the ten million owed over deals gone bad. But before he can inform his client of his success the manager is found dead. He digs into the case and soon learns that the man is not the first to die under mysterious circumstances. It is soon evident that many managers of funds that have had huge losses in the recent are being killed off. Silas with his insider perspectives and anonymous identity is the perfect investigator into the mystery of who is killing off some of the most hated moneymen of Wall Street. Teaming up with a beautiful financial blogger, the go on the trail of a violent security crew he believes played a critical role in the suspected executions. With panic and paranoia spreading, he begins to wonder if maybe the threat may be from someone on the inside.

“Full Ratchet” the second novel of the Silas Cade series of novels shows the Mitch Rapp or Jack Reacher nature of Silas Cade. Cade is after financial reform though his methods do not come with a pen but rather plenty of action and firepower. After a few years of kicking the bad guys in Wall Street, he jumps at eh chance to go work in Main Street Pennsylvania. The jobs are not that dangerous or hard, but he soon finds the people on Main Street are not angels either. Cooper is sent to audit one of the big manufacturers in Pittsburgh and discovers that the company is rotten to the core. Not everyone is happy with his revelations, particularly some trigger-happy Russian mobsters who engage the services of an assassin named Harmony to take him out. Tension builds as bullet riddled battles rage in the Appalachian fracking fields, the forest, and defunct steel mills that drags in Cade’s disaffected brother.