Reading List

Authors Like Alex Berenson

Q: What should I read first by Alex Berenson?

The Faithful Spy (2006), the first John Wells novel and the one that won the Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author in 2007. Wells is a CIA officer who has spent years embedded inside al-Qaeda, has converted to Islam, and comes home to an agency that no longer trusts him. Read the twelve novels in publication order after that; they run to The Deceivers in 2018. If you have come for the non-fiction instead, start with Tell Your Children (2019) and read the scientific criticism of it alongside, not afterwards.

Q: How many John Wells books are there and what order do they go in?

Twelve, published one a year from 2006 to 2018: The Faithful Spy (2006), The Ghost War (2008), The Silent Man (2009), The Midnight House (2010), The Secret Soldier (2011), The Shadow Patrol (2012), The Night Ranger (2013), The Counterfeit Agent (2014), Twelve Days (2015), The Wolves (2016), The Prisoner (2017) and The Deceivers (2018). The first was published by Random House and the rest by Putnam. They are worth reading in order: the plot arcs carry over, and The Counterfeit Agent and Twelve Days are effectively one story.

Q: Is Alex Berenson still writing novels?

Not the series. The last John Wells novel, The Deceivers, appeared in 2018, and his standalone thriller The Power Couple was published by Simon & Schuster in February 2021. Since then his output has been non-fiction and his Substack, Unreported Truths, which he began in 2021 and which he says has around 250,000 subscribers. He has not announced a thirteenth John Wells book. If you want a series that is still being written, Daniel Silva publishes a Gabriel Allon novel every summer, and David McCloskey and I. S. Berry are the strongest recent debuts in the same territory.

Twelve novels in twelve years about John Wells, a CIA officer who converted to Islam while embedded inside al-Qaeda — written by a man who had spent the previous decade at The New York Times covering the Iraq occupation, the drug industry and the Madoff fraud. The Faithful Spy (Random House, 2006) won the Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author in 2007; the series ran to The Deceivers in 2018 and then stopped. What replaced it was a second career that most readers arrive here already knowing about: Tell Your Children (Free Press, 2019), which argued that high-potency cannabis causes psychosis and violence, and Pandemia (Regnery, 2021), which argued that the COVID response did more damage than the virus. Twitter permanently suspended him on 28 August 2021; he sued, and on 6 July 2022 the company reinstated the account under a confidential settlement, acknowledging that the tweets should not have led to the suspension when they did. He now writes the Substack Unreported Truths. There is a dated account of all of that further down. The ten writers below were chosen for both halves of the shelf, because a page that only serves one half sends half its readers away empty.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Spy thrillers · Investigative non-fiction · Edgar Award 2007 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you came for the John Wells novels, the closest match is Daniel Silva — another wire-service reporter who turned a foreign beat into a twenty-six-book series about one operative. Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp books are the faster, blunter shelf-neighbour, and Frederick Forsyth is where the whole reporter's-realism method comes from. If you came for the non-fiction, Katherine Eban does the pharmaceutical-industry investigation Berenson used to do for the Times, at book length and on the record. For the argument he provoked rather than the argument he made, read Johann Hari on drugs and Zeynep Tufekci on the pandemic.

Every book by Alex Berenson →

10 authors like Alex Berenson

Closest match · The long series

Daniel Silva

American · The Kill Artist (2000), The Order (2020), Ransom (2026)

Silva reported for United Press International from Cairo and the Persian Gulf and then ran CNN's talk-show unit before he wrote fiction. Gabriel Allon — art restorer, Israeli intelligence officer, reluctant assassin — has carried twenty-six novels since The Kill Artist in 2000, one a year, each built on a current news story: Russian oligarchs, Vatican archives, looted art, Iranian nuclear procurement. The twenty-sixth, Ransom, is published on 14 July 2026. The books take an explicit and unapologetic pro-Israel line and their politics have been criticised on exactly that ground.

The nearest thing to a like-for-like swap on this page. Both men were working reporters who kept the reporting habit when they moved to fiction: a real briefing, a real procedure, a real city, and then the invented operation laid over it. Both built a single recurring officer who is competent, isolated and increasingly tired, and both let the geopolitics of the year the book was written set the plot rather than inventing a fictional enemy. Silva has twenty-six books to Berenson's twelve and is still writing, which is the practical reason to start here.

— Lisanne

The shelf-neighbour

Vince Flynn

American · Transfer of Power (1999), American Assassin (2010)

Flynn self-published Term Limits in 1997 after it was turned down repeatedly, sold it into a mass-market deal, and built the Mitch Rapp series into one of the biggest properties in American thriller publishing. Rapp is a counterterrorism operator who works outside the rules and is proved right by events; Flynn consulted on the Fox series 24 and publicly defended coercive interrogation, which is the position his novels dramatise. He died of prostate cancer on 19 June 2013, aged 47. The series has continued without him, written by Kyle Mills from 2015 and by Don Bentley from Capture or Kill in 2024.

The book most Berenson readers already own. Rapp and John Wells are the same job description a decade apart, and both series run on the assumption that the operator in the field sees the threat before Washington does. The difference is temperature. Flynn writes at speed and lets Rapp win; Berenson slows down for the tradecraft and the cost, and Wells comes out of most books worse than he went in. Read Flynn when you want the pace, and note that the politics are stated openly rather than implied.

— Lisanne

Before the genre · Where the method comes from

Frederick Forsyth

British · The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972)

Forsyth was a Reuters correspondent in Paris and East Berlin and a BBC reporter in Biafra before he wrote The Day of the Jackal in thirty-five days. It invented the documentary thriller: a procedure told in procurement orders, passport applications and police memoranda, about an assassination the reader already knows failed. In the memoir The Outsider (2015) he disclosed that he had done unpaid work for MI6 for more than twenty years, beginning in Biafra. He supported UKIP and Brexit and wrote a long-running Daily Express column; his politics were never hidden. He died on 9 June 2025, aged 86.

The ancestor of the form Berenson works in, and worth reading first if you want to see where the machinery came from. Forsyth established the rule both men follow: the thriller earns its tension from verifiable procedure, not from the reader being kept ignorant. He is also the proof that reporters have been crossing into this genre for fifty years — foreign desk, then novels, then a public political line, in that order. Start with The Day of the Jackal, which is still the cleanest demonstration of the technique anyone has written.

— Lisanne

The argument against

John le Carré

British · The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

David Cornwell worked for MI5 and then MI6 and wrote under a pen name because serving officers could not publish; his cover was among those blown by Kim Philby. His subject is not the operation but the institution — the committee, the file, the betrayal that is administrative rather than dramatic — and his officers are usually defeated by their own side. He took Irish citizenship shortly before his death on 12 December 2020. Adam Sisman's The Secret Life of John le Carré (2023) documented a long series of affairs that had been kept out of the authorised 2015 biography, drawing on material le Carré had asked him to withhold.

On this page as the counter-argument rather than the match. The whole premise of the John Wells novels — that a single dedicated officer can see clearly and act decisively where the bureaucracy cannot — is the premise le Carré spent sixty years dismantling. His officers do not save the city; they discover that the operation was a lie, and that they helped. Read him after a run of Berenson or Flynn and the genre's assumptions become visible for the first time. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the one to start with.

— Lisanne

The one who was actually there

I. S. Berry

American · The Peacock and the Sparrow (2023)

Berry served as a CIA case officer, including a tour in Baghdad during the war, before writing her first novel. The Peacock and the Sparrow is set in Bahrain during the Arab Spring and narrated by a burnt-out officer running an agent inside the protest movement; the tradecraft is unglamorous and the operation's purpose is never quite what the officer is told. It won the 2024 Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author — the same prize Berenson won for The Faithful Spy seventeen years earlier — and a film adaptation was announced in 2026.

The most useful recent book on this page, and the direct answer to the question of what the genre looks like when it is written by someone who did the job. Same territory as Berenson — a case officer in an Arab country, an asset who may be running the officer rather than the other way round — and a completely different centre of gravity: the field work is dull, morally compromising and mostly futile, and the operation exists to satisfy a headquarters requirement. She and Berenson won the same Edgar in the same category, which makes the pairing easy to check for yourself.

— Lisanne

The pharma beat, done at book length

Katherine Eban

American · Dangerous Doses (2005), Bottle of Lies (2019)

Eban is a national investigative correspondent for Rolling Stone and a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair and Fortune. Bottle of Lies reconstructs systematic data fraud at the Indian generic manufacturer Ranbaxy and the failure of American regulators to inspect overseas plants properly; it won the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award and the National Association of Science Writers' Science in Society book award. She reported the internal Trump-administration push on hydroxychloroquine in April 2020 and, in Vanity Fair on 3 June 2021, one of the first mainstream investigations of the laboratory-origin question for COVID-19 — a piece that was contested at the time and has not been retracted.

This is the beat Berenson used to hold. Between 1999 and 2010 he covered drug safety for the Times; Eban is what that beat looks like sustained across a whole book, with documents, named sources and a paper trail a reader can follow. Both work from the premise that a regulator and an industry can share an interest in not looking, and both went at the COVID story from outside the official account. The difference is method rather than temperament: Eban's conclusions are built from records she can show you, and she stops where the records stop.

— Lisanne

Drugs, from the other end of the street

Beth Macy

American · Dopesick (2018), Raising Lazarus (2022), Paper Girl (2025)

Macy reported for the Roanoke Times for about twenty-five years before writing books. Dopesick traces OxyContin from Purdue Pharma's marketing decisions to the coalfield counties of Virginia and West Virginia, largely through the families of the dead; she co-wrote and co-executive-produced the Hulu adaptation in 2021. Raising Lazarus (2022) follows harm-reduction workers and argues for medication-assisted treatment. Some drug-policy researchers argue that the Dopesick account weights prescription opioids too heavily against illicit fentanyl and heroin in explaining the later phases of the crisis. Paper Girl, about class and political division in her own town, was published in October 2025.

The same subject as Tell Your Children — a drug, a population, a claim about cause — approached from the opposite direction and with the opposite politics. Berenson argues from epidemiological studies toward a warning about a substance; Macy argues from individual case histories toward a criticism of a company and a treatment system. Reading them together is the cheapest way to see how much of a drug argument is carried by the choice of evidence rather than by the evidence itself. She also ends up recommending exactly what he does not: keeping users alive rather than deterring them.

— Lisanne

Every book by Beth Macy →

The opposite case on drugs

Johann Hari

British · Chasing the Scream (2015), Magic Pill (2024)

Hari wrote Chasing the Scream, a narrative history of the war on drugs that argues prohibition rather than the substances causes most of the harm, and it is the popular book most directly opposed to Berenson's cannabis argument. His record is a live issue. In 2011 he was found to have passed interviewees' previously published words off as remarks made to him; he admitted editing the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised him under the pseudonym “David Rose”, was suspended by The Independent, returned his Orwell Prize on 27 September 2011 and left the paper in January 2012. Later books have drawn further sourcing complaints: Jeremy Duns documented altered quotations in the Chasing the Scream interview audio, and reviewers at The Guardian and The Telegraph listed factual errors in Magic Pill (2024).

The clearest available statement of the case Berenson wrote Tell Your Children against, and useful precisely because the two books are mirror images: both are journalist-written, both are built on interviews and selected studies, both were attacked by specialists for the same category of error. Reading them in sequence is a short course in how a popular drug book is constructed. The honest way to use this pairing is to apply the same scepticism to each of them, which is why the paragraph above is here rather than left out.

— Lisanne

The other heterodox pandemic voice

Zeynep Tufekci

Turkish-American · Twitter and Tear Gas (2017)

Tufekci trained as a programmer, became a sociologist of technology, and is now Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton and a New York Times opinion columnist. Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press, 2017), which she made free to download, is about how networked protest movements gain reach and lose durability — and about who decides what stays up. In early 2020 she argued publicly against official guidance on masks and, later, for airborne transmission, co-authoring papers in The Lancet and Science in 2021. In March 2023 she argued in the Times against reading a Cochrane review as showing that masks do not work; Cochrane's editor-in-chief called that reading inaccurate on 10 March 2023, the review's lead author publicly rejected the clarification, and her part in prompting it has been disputed since.

The most instructive comparison on this page, because she and Berenson made the same structural move and it is worth seeing them side by side: both went against official pandemic guidance early and in public, and both were told they were spreading misinformation. What differs is where each of them ended up on the record, and how each handled being wrong. Twitter and Tear Gas is also the book to read on the second half of his story — how platforms decide what counts as harm — and it was written four years before the suspension, by someone with no stake in that fight.

— Lisanne

The other pandemic book

Michael Lewis

American · The Big Short (2010), The Premonition (2021)

Lewis writes institutional failure through the few people inside who saw it coming: bond traders, baseball scouts, the analysts who shorted the housing market. The Premonition (W. W. Norton, 2021) does this for the American pandemic response, following a group of public-health officials who had built pandemic plans years earlier and could not get the Centers for Disease Control to act on them. His Going Infinite (W. W. Norton, 3 October 2023), written with unusual access to Sam Bankman-Fried, was published on the first day of the FTX fraud trial and criticised at length by reviewers at the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post for credulity toward its subject, who was convicted on all counts on 2 November 2023.

Two connections, both worth making. Berenson's first book, The Number (Random House, 2003), is a Wall Street book of the kind Lewis had already made a genre — how the quarterly earnings figure came to distort everything around it — so this is where the non-fiction line actually starts. And The Premonition is the other book about the same failure: a scathing account of the CDC, written from inside the public-health establishment rather than against it. Anyone who reads Pandemia and wants to know which criticisms survive when the politics are removed should read it next.

— Lisanne

Every book by Michael Lewis →

Authors like Michael Lewis →

Where to start if you loved Alex Berenson

If you came for the spy novels, read Daniel Silva.

The Kill Artist is where Gabriel Allon starts. Another reporter's series, twenty-six books deep and still running.

If you want the pace rather than the tradecraft, read Vince Flynn.

Transfer of Power or American Assassin. Mitch Rapp is the same job as John Wells, faster and louder.

If you want to see where the method came from, read Frederick Forsyth.

The Day of the Jackal (1971). Procurement orders and police memoranda, and it is still unbearably tense.

If you want the case officer's own version, read I. S. Berry.

The Peacock and the Sparrow. Written by a former CIA officer, and it won the same Edgar Berenson did.

If you came for the reporting, read Katherine Eban.

Bottle of Lies. The drug-industry beat Berenson held at the Times, done at book length with the documents attached.

If you want more reporting of this kind

My shelf of investigative journalism has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Alex Berenson

Who should I read if I like Alex Berenson?

It depends which Berenson you mean. For the John Wells spy novels, Daniel Silva is the closest match — another former foreign correspondent running a single operative through a long series — with Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp books as the faster shelf-neighbour and Frederick Forsyth as the ancestor of the whole documentary-thriller method. For the non-fiction, Katherine Eban does the pharmaceutical investigation Berenson used to do for The New York Times, and Beth Macy covers drugs and addiction from the opposite political direction. For the arguments he provoked, Johann Hari on drug policy and Zeynep Tufekci on the pandemic and on platform moderation.

What should I read first by Alex Berenson?

The Faithful Spy (2006), the first John Wells novel and the one that won the Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author in 2007. Wells is a CIA officer who has spent years embedded inside al-Qaeda, has converted to Islam, and comes home to an agency that no longer trusts him. Read the twelve novels in publication order after that; they run to The Deceivers in 2018. If you have come for the non-fiction instead, start with Tell Your Children (2019) and read the scientific criticism of it alongside, not afterwards.

How many John Wells books are there and what order do they go in?

Twelve, published one a year from 2006 to 2018: The Faithful Spy (2006), The Ghost War (2008), The Silent Man (2009), The Midnight House (2010), The Secret Soldier (2011), The Shadow Patrol (2012), The Night Ranger (2013), The Counterfeit Agent (2014), Twelve Days (2015), The Wolves (2016), The Prisoner (2017) and The Deceivers (2018). The first was published by Random House and the rest by Putnam. They are worth reading in order: the plot arcs carry over, and The Counterfeit Agent and Twelve Days are effectively one story.

Is Alex Berenson still writing novels?

Not the series. The last John Wells novel, The Deceivers, appeared in 2018, and his standalone thriller The Power Couple was published by Simon & Schuster in February 2021. Since then his output has been non-fiction and his Substack, Unreported Truths, which he began in 2021 and which he says has around 250,000 subscribers. He has not announced a thirteenth John Wells book. If you want a series that is still being written, Daniel Silva publishes a Gabriel Allon novel every summer, and David McCloskey and I. S. Berry are the strongest recent debuts in the same territory.

Why was Alex Berenson banned from Twitter, and did he get his account back?

Twitter permanently suspended him on 28 August 2021, after five strikes under its COVID-19 misinformation policy, for tweets about the vaccines — including the claim that they should be thought of as a therapeutic rather than a vaccine because they do not stop infection or transmission. He sued the company in December 2021. In April 2022 a federal judge allowed one contract-based claim to proceed, and on 6 July 2022 his account was reinstated under a confidential settlement; Berenson said Twitter had acknowledged that the tweets should not have led to the suspension when they did. In April 2023 he filed a second suit, against Biden administration officials and Pfizer executives, alleging they had pressured Twitter to remove him. On 29 September 2025 Judge Jessica G. L. Clarke of the Southern District of New York dismissed that case, holding that he lacked standing to seek forward-looking relief and that no damages remedy was available against the federal defendants. That was a ruling on remedies rather than a decision on whether the pressure occurred.

Is Tell Your Children accurate?

That is the argument, and it is not settled by consensus in his favour. The book, published by Free Press on 8 January 2019, argues that high-potency cannabis causes psychosis and that psychosis drives violence. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a sympathetic New Yorker essay in January 2019 that made it a bestseller. On 14 February 2019 about a hundred scholars and clinicians, from institutions including Columbia, Harvard Medical School and NYU, published an open letter accusing him of cherry-picking, of inferring causation from correlation, and of mishandling the racial-disparity data. Named researchers including Ziva Cooper, Carl Hart and Yasmin Hurd objected on the record. What is not in dispute is that an association between heavy high-THC use and psychosis exists in the literature; what is disputed is whether it is causal and how large it is. Read the book and the open letter together.

What did Alex Berenson do at The New York Times?

He was a business investigative reporter there from December 1999 until 2010, after starting at the Denver Post and the financial site TheStreet. He covered the pharmaceutical industry and drug safety, reported from Iraq during the occupation in 2003 and 2004, and covered the Bernard Madoff fraud from December 2008. His first book, The Number (Random House, 2003), came out of that beat. His time there also produced a finding against him: in February 2007 Judge Jack Weinstein ruled that the lawyer James Gottstein had conspired with Berenson to leak sealed Eli Lilly documents about the drug Zyprexa to the paper, and ordered the documents returned.

Is Alex Berenson a doctor or a scientist?

No. He holds a BA in history and economics from Yale, awarded in 1994, and his training is in journalism, not medicine, epidemiology or statistics. He has never claimed a scientific qualification; his argument has always been that a reporter reading the same published studies and regulatory filings can reach different conclusions from the officials summarising them. Whether that method held up is the whole dispute, and it is the reason the writers on this page include people who applied it well and people who applied it badly.

Are there writers like Alex Berenson who are still publishing?

Yes, on both sides. In fiction: Daniel Silva, whose twenty-sixth Gabriel Allon novel Ransom is out on 14 July 2026; I. S. Berry, a former CIA case officer who won the 2024 Edgar for best first novel; and David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst whose Damascus and Moscow novels have taken over much of this shelf. In non-fiction: Katherine Eban, Beth Macy, whose Paper Girl appeared in October 2025, and Michael Lewis. Berenson himself publishes several times a week on Substack rather than in books.

Did Amazon really block one of his books?

Briefly, and it was reversed. In June 2020 Amazon declined to publish the first part of his self-published booklet series Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns, telling him it did not comply with its guidelines and pointing readers to official health sources. Elon Musk and others criticised the decision publicly, and Amazon restored the title within hours, saying it had been removed in error. It is a small episode but it is where the platform argument in his second career effectively begins, more than a year before the Twitter suspension.

Sources

List last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Alex Berenson

10 authors like Alex Berenson

Daniel Silva

Vince Flynn

Frederick Forsyth

John le Carré

I. S. Berry

Katherine Eban

Beth Macy

Johann Hari

Zeynep Tufekci

Michael Lewis

Where to start if you loved Alex Berenson

Frequently asked questions about authors like Alex Berenson

Who should I read if I like Alex Berenson?

What should I read first by Alex Berenson?

How many John Wells books are there and what order do they go in?

Is Alex Berenson still writing novels?

Why was Alex Berenson banned from Twitter, and did he get his account back?

Is Tell Your Children accurate?

What did Alex Berenson do at The New York Times?

Is Alex Berenson a doctor or a scientist?

Are there writers like Alex Berenson who are still publishing?

Did Amazon really block one of his books?

Lisanne Swart

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