David Krugler Books In Order

Publication Order of Ellis Voigt Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Author David Krugler grew up in a town called Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He left his home state to go to Creighton University in the eighties, which is in Omaha, Nebraska. He graduated with degrees in history and English, and earned both an MA and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in history.

He moved back to the state of Wisconsin in the year 1997 and is now Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Krugler is a historian on the modern United States, and has published books on different topics.

He has been a faculty leader for teacher education programs at both the Master of American History and Newberry Library in Chicago and the Government program at Ashland University which is in Ashland, Ohio.

Krugler has gotten fellowships and research grants from Organization of American Historians, National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Wisconsin System Institute on Ethnicity and Race, and White House Historical Association.

He was in a documentary in the year 2010 for the National Geographic Channel called “American Doomsday”.

Besides writing and teaching, he likes to travel overseas, go to art museums, and read mysteries.

His debut novel, “The Dead Don’t Bleed” was released in the year 2016, and is the first of his “Ellis Voigt” series. His fictional work is a combination of spy-thriller, murder-mystery, and historical war fiction.

“The Dead Don’t Bleed” is the first novel in the “Ellis Voigt” series, which was released in the year 2016. Washington D. C., in the year 1945. The war is about to be won, but there is a new fear that holds the wartime capital transfixed. There is fear of communist spies as well as the atomic secrets they are looking to get their hands on. A Navy Intelligence officer’s corpse is found in a cobblestone back alley, and Lieutenant Voigt is brought in to investigate.

It may be the first murder he has ever investigated, but the more he unravels this plot, he finds it won’t be his last. He pursues crosses as well as double crosses, and goes undercover. Voigt finds some fragments (like Uranium-235, a defecting German physicist, and a top secret lab in New Mexico) that suggest a scheme much larger than the run of the mill spy v. spy shenanigans.

Quickly, he is in a race against time to catch the killer, and keep the bomb out of the hands of the Russians. He would also like to keep in front of his secrets.

Krugler is able to bring both the story and the setting to life, which brings a lot of historical credibility to this quite unique story. He is able to easily place the reader in 1945 Washington D. C. Fans of the novel found this to be a remarkable read that gets even better when the main guy goes undercover. The ending surprised quite a few readers, as well.

“Rip the Angels from Heaven” is the second novel in the “Ellis Voigt” series, which was released in the year 2018. Ellis Voigt of the Office of Naval Intelligence desperately wants to keep his secrets that currently threatening his very life. Overseas, the war is going well for America, but Voigt is unable to escape a web of undercover spies and double agents who are following every move he makes.

The FBI still suspects he is the one who killed a Naval officer in a back alley and that Voigt is a communist. The Soviets think he has information and is holding out on their contacts. They are willing to do whatever it takes to get it out of him.

Voigt gets sent to New Mexico on a mission to identify a Soviet spy, and gets tailed by the Russians and FBI. He has very few people that he can trust at this point. The team at Los Alamos is getting ready to test an atomic bomb in the desert. At the same time, Voigt is facing a dilemma that he has been trying to avoid. He can save his own skin or make sure the Soviets do not get the bomb, but he might be unable to do both.

Fans of the novel found that these books do a great job of including all of the historically accurate details of the time but still are highly entertaining. Krugler plots these books elegantly complex, but these are still compellingly readable. Voigt is fully developed and readers get a further look into who he is exactly.

“The Voice of America” is the first non-fiction book, which was released in the year 2000. Tensions with the Soviet Union warp into the Cold War. Under Harry S. Truman’s leadership, the US government carries out different programs with the goal of stopping communism’s expansion. The Voice of America with the legislative mandate to tell the entire world about America and explain its foreign policies. It quickly makes itself the ideological arm of containment. The goal is to keep the world informed about the United States and refute all Soviet international propaganda.

There were constant problems with this program, despite it being part of a broad based anticommunist initiative, during its run from 1945 until 1953. Some of these problems include canceled transmitter building projects, congressional investigations, cut budgets, and a lot of neglect by the State Department (which was its operating agency) and the other national security agencies.

“This is Only a Test” is the second nonfiction book, which was released in the year 2006. The book uses the often conflicting identities of Washington (city, capital, and symbol) to explore all the connections between the attempted dispersal of important government offices to distant sites out in the suburbs, the founding of a secretive organization known as the Federal Relocation Arc, and District’s Office of Civil Defense.

All measures to keep the federal government safe cause a widening gap between the city and the capital. At the same time, the failures the city’s local program is a symbol of the federal ambivalence toward civil defense measures.

This book shows the ways the Cold War affected Washington and its own racially divided population.