Isaac Bell

About the Isaac Bell series

Isaac Bell is the chief investigator for the Van Dorn Detective Agency in early-twentieth-century America, a Yale-educated, ivory-cane-wielding operative who chases saboteurs, robber-baron conspiracies and serial killers across a country still being built by railroads, oil derricks and Model Ts. Clive Cussler launched the series in 2007 as a period cousin to Dirk Pitt: the same appetite for elaborate action set pieces and a hero who is unbeatable at everything he attempts, but transplanted into a Gilded Age/Progressive Era setting rich with real history — the birth of American aviation, the rise of organized crime during Prohibition, the robber-baron industrial titans — that gives each case a distinctive backdrop the contemporary-set Cussler series can't offer.

Justin Scott co-wrote the bulk of the series through the 2010s, grounding Bell's adventures in meticulously researched period detail, before Jack Du Brul (who also writes the Oregon Files) took over starting with The Titanic Secret in 2019 and has continued the series solo since Cussler's 2020 death. Readers who enjoy Dirk Pitt's globe-trotting problem-solving but want it filtered through a Prohibition-and-railroads period setting — closer in spirit to a hardboiled pulp serial than a modern techno-thriller — are the natural audience for Isaac Bell.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with The Chase (2007). Each novel is a self-contained investigation, so the series is easy to start anywhere, though it also unfolds in rough historical sequence as America moves from the 1900s toward the 1930s across the books.

Justin Scott wrote books 2-10 (2009-2017) after Cussler solo-wrote the debut; Jack Du Brul has written every book since The Titanic Secret (2019), including all of the post-2020 entries written without Cussler's involvement. There's no reboot or jarring tonal shift at either handoff — new readers can pick up any entry cold.