Ben Coes

Ben Coes is an American thriller novelist born September 10, 1966, in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in West Simsbury. He attended the Groton School and Columbia College before building an unusually well-connected early career: a White House internship under Ronald Reagan, a speechwriting post for Secretary of Energy James D. Watkins under George H.W. Bush, a fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and a stint as campaign manager for Mitt Romney's 2002 run for Massachusetts governor. He has said his godfather, a Navy SEAL, was an early influence on the realistic, high-stakes violence in his fiction.

Coes debuted as a novelist in 2010 with Power Down, introducing Dewey Andreas, an ex-Army Ranger who becomes a covert operative fighting conspiracies against American infrastructure and national security. The series -- now ten novels and a novella, running through 2026's Hijack -- became a New York Times bestselling franchise and drew comparisons to Vince Flynn and Tom Clancy for its insider-informed, reality-based plotting. In 2019 he launched a second series, Rob Tacoma, with a younger CIA officer protagonist; no further entries in that series had appeared as of this catalogue's curation in August 2026.