Paul Kemprecos

Paul Kemprecos is an American author best known for co-writing the early NUMA Files novels with Clive Cussler, introducing marine engineer and NUMA special-assignments head Kurt Austin in Serpent in 1999 and continuing through several further entries that established the character and tone Cussler's later co-writers, Graham Brown among them, would carry forward. The NUMA Files run alongside Cussler's flagship Dirk Pitt series, sharing NUMA as an organization but following a distinct hero and a somewhat more overtly globe-trotting, gadget-driven flavor of adventure thriller.

Before turning to fiction, Kemprecos worked as a journalist, and he brought that reporter's eye for research and pacing to the technothriller structure he and Cussler developed together for Austin's adventures. He also wrote a standalone mystery series, the Aristotle "Soc" Socarides novels, set among the Cape Cod fishing community, showing a range beyond the Cussler collaboration.

A new reader wanting the NUMA Files at its origin should start with Serpent, which introduces Kurt Austin and the series' template of underwater peril and historical mystery. There is no film or TV adaptation of the NUMA Files specifically, though the wider Cussler-verse reached the screen via the 2005 film Sahara.