Before switching to fiction writing in 2015, Patrick Oster was a managing editor at Bloomberg News and editor-in-chief of the National Law Journal. After the switch, he also wrote dozens of obituaries for Bloomberg of famous and infamous people, giving him the idea for his prize-winning murder mystery, "The Obituary Writer."

He worked for Business Week and the Washington Post in Europe, for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America and covered the White House, State Department, the Supreme Court and the CIA as Washington Bureau Chief of The Chicago Sun-Times.

He is the author of the nonfiction book, "The Mexicans," a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. His first novel was the award-winning comic thriller "The Commuter." He also wrote "The German Club," a spy thriller set at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the cyber-thriller "The Hacker Chronicles." His wrote the award winning murder mystery, "The Amazon Detective Agency." His last novel, "The Sleeper List," was named best espionage thriller of 2022 by the Readers Favorite book site.