Patrick Oster, an award-winning White House reporter and foreign correspondent who started out as an international lawyer, has made a career out of taking snippets of real news he covered in Washington, New York, Mexico City, Berlin and Moscow and spinning out well-reviewed what-if thrillers that educate as well as entertain.
BOOKS.
In his debut thriller, "The Commuter," Oster adopted a comic tone to tell the story of Barnaby, an avid birder who finds himself out of a job and chooses to use his new free time to follow people on his commuter train to satisfy his curiosity about where they go. In the course of finding out that humans are quite a different species from birds when it comes to their reaction to following them, Oster's clueless hero encounters Chinese makers of illegal knock-off goods, a sex-addicted FBI agent, a murderous mobster pretending to be a fishmonger and a strict instructress he finds strangely attractive.
In "The German Club," which Kirkus Reviews called "a solid, worthwhile espionage thriller," a German-American homicide detective from Chicago gets lured to West Germany to look into the apparent murder of a brother he didn't know he had and winds up a key player in the machinations behind the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In his cyber-thriller "The Hacker Chronicles," Oster takes readers into the mysterious world of cyber-espionage as his rule-bending millennial hacker hero battles with Chinese and Russian cyberspies as he tries to save a young damsel from being charged with a murder she did not commit.
His fifth novel, "The Obituary Writer," is another murder mystery that Kirkus called "a captivating thriller." The plot focuses on a down-on-his-luck journalist forced to take a job writing trashy online obituaries. When one of subjects, a Nobel Prize nominee, is found with his wrist slashed, the supposed suicide makes no sense and the reporter turns detective to see if something more nefarious occurred. For his latest novel, the spy thriller, “The Sleeper List,” click on the Blog.
HOME.
Now residing in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, finding a town to call home was the end of a long journey that began when Oster was born in Harvey, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, on October 9, 1944, a handful, first-child for his parents Clarence and Rita. He grew up in the Chicago area, going to Queen of Apostles elementary school in Riverdale, Illinois , and Brother Rice High School in Chicago. He got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Loyola University in Chicago and a law degree from Cornell University, which qualified him for that international trade and admiralty career that began his full-time job life. After that he has consistently been what he jokingly calls a scribbler, writing news stories, his Mexico book and then a series of novels with a little obituary writing on the side.
