Richard Van Anderson Books In Order – Complete List

Richard Van Anderson is a former heart surgeon with a strong desire to write books and now is a full-time medical thriller writer. His first book, The Organ Takers, is part of the David McBride trilogy, with two more books released in 2017 and 2020, respectively.

Here is the list of Richard Van Anderson books in order of reading and publication order.

David McBride Books in Publication Order

1. The Organ Takers, 2014
2. The Organ Growers, 2017
3. CoVid, 2020

Short Stories in Publication Order

• The Final Push, 2013

Richard Van Anderson Biography

Richard Van Anderson was born in 1960. He is a former heart surgeon who eventually trades his scalpel for the pen to become a medical thriller author.

His medical training, work experience, and degrees earned are impressive. With a medical degree from St. Louis University School of Medicine, Richard Van Anderson had his general surgery residency at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, after which he trained in cardiothoracic surgery at New York University.

He also attended a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, which lasted for two years.

Once his training was over, he became a surgical attending at the University of Washington School of Medicine, while also being the Chief of Cardiac Surgery, at Seattle Veterans Administration Hospital.

During his time working as a surgeon, he had spent many hours at the operating table, drilling in almost every bone a person can have.

As a child, he loved reading Mark Twain’s works, and in high school he also loved writing. In college, he was quite a proficient writer, but at that time he had no ideas of writing books. He was a surgery resident when he started keeping notes about interesting and strange cases he came across, interesting people he met, and things he found.

During his internship in the transplant service, tales about people waking up in hotel bathrooms on ice with missing kidneys were all the rage, so he started thinking about the feasibility of it. After taking many notes and balancing various ideas in his mind, eventually, this initial thought became The Organ Takers, the first book in the David McBride series.

In terms of writing courses, he took several online courses, as well as attended night classes at the University of Washington. He received an MFA degree in creative writing from Pine Manor College in Boston after a two-year master’s program. While there, he was taught by Dennis Lehane.

His three novels in the David McBride series are strongly influenced by Richard Van Anderson’s personal medical experience as a surgeon. His books are part of the medical thriller genre, but the author called himself the inventor of the subgenre of surgical suspense.

While initially, The Organ Takers was to be a standalone novel, the author mentioned in an interview that he left him in a dark spot at the end of the novel, so he had to continue the series. At this point, he already knew it would become a trilogy.

In The Organ Takers, David McBride is a fifth-year resident who gets mixed up in a scandal involving his mentor, after which both lose their licenses, so they can no longer practice medicine. His mentor starts his own practice which he will fund with harvested organs, and he basically coerces David to be his organ harvester.

Currently, the author lives in Bellevue, Washington, a Seattle suburb, with his wife, who is an oral surgeon, and their two sons. Earlier, he loved mountain climbing, but these days he is happy to take long walks and backpacking trips in the Cascades and Sierras.