John Dudley Ball

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John Dudley Ball's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    28 Books (2 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1965
  • Latest Book:
    November 2016
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Full Series List in Order

A Chief Jack Tallon Mystery

1 - Police Chief (1977)
2 - Trouble for Tallon (Jan-1981)
3 - Chief Tallon and the S.O.R. (Jun-1984)

A Virgil Tibbs Mystery

1 - In the Heat of the Night (1965)
2 - The Cool Cottontail (1966)
3 - Death for a Playmate (1969)
4 - Five Pieces of Jade (Apr-1972)
5 - The Eyes of Buddha (1976)
6 - Singapore (Jan-1986)
7 - Then Came Violence (Apr-1980)

Book List in Order: 28 titles

  • In the Heat of the Night

    A Virgil Tibbs Mystery - 1

    A 50th-anniversary edition of the pioneering novel featuring African American police detective Virgil Tibbs -- with a foreword by John Ridley, creator of the TV series American Crime and Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave “They cal...

  • The Cool Cottontail

    A Virgil Tibbs Mystery - 2

    Sun Valley Lodge, run by Forrest Nunn and his wife Emily, with the assistance of their three children—Linda, a most attractive teenager, her twenty-four-year-old brother George, and small Carole—was in a nudist park which had an excelle...

  • Death for a Playmate

    A Virgil Tibbs Mystery - 3

  • The First Team

    Moscow has taken the USA without a shot. Student protesters are being slaughtered in the Midwest. The Jewish pogroms have begun. You are now living in Soviet-occupied America!One nuclear submarine and a handful of determined patriots against the comb...

  • Five Pieces of Jade

    A Virgil Tibbs Mystery - 4

    A nice tight murder puzzle. ???Times Literary SupplementThe body of an elderly Chinese importer of rare jade lies on the carpet of a quietly expensive house in Pasadena, California. In a rough semicircle around his head rest four pieces of jade; prot...

  • Mark One: The Dummy

    Ed Nesbitt has a problem.Nesbitt is the author of dozens of phenomenally successful suspense novels starring that lethal super-agent of the West, Mark Day, master of karate and aikido, and irresistible womanizer. Everyone loves his books???So realist...

  • The Eyes of Buddha

    A Virgil Tibbs Mystery - 5

    A partially decomposed body of a young woman is discovered in a park in Pasadena, California. The woman was strangled but not sexually assaulted. The police suspect she might be a missing heiress who disappeared over a year ago, but dental records pr...

  • Phase Three Alert

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    March 1943, at the height of World War II, a newly commissioned B-17 bomber is nearing the west coast of Greenland. Flown by a carefully picked crew, it is carrying a piece of vital secret cargo that under no circumstances can be allowed to fall in...

  • Police Chief

    A Chief Jack Tallon Mystery - 1

    NIGHT STALKER Drug addicts, prostitutes, street gangs and shoot-outs. Police Sergeant Jack Tallon had had enough; he wanted out. He traded his L.A. beat for the quiet, wide-open spaces of Whitewater, Washington. And trouble followed. A few sho...



  • A Killing in the Market

    Police specialist John Harbizon receives help from two dedicated investigative reporters in his work on the serial murders of a stock-exchange speculator, a financial manipulator, and the vice president of a Los Angeles brokerage firm...

  • Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms

    She Broke an Ancient Tradition by Falling in Love Kanno Masayo, Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, is the loveliest and most glamorous geisha in all of Japan. Dick Seaton is a shy, handsome American whose business takes him to Japan to close a very...

  • Then Came Violence

    A Virgil Tibbs Mystery - 7

    Virgil Tibbs, the cool, highly-competent black detective of the Pasedena Police Department, returns one day to his bachelor apartment to find that it has been expertly stripped to the bare walls???not a thing remains to show that he has ever lived th...

  • Trouble for Tallon

    A Chief Jack Tallon Mystery - 2

    A CASE OF PIOUS MURDER? When a City Councilman is killed, the citizens of Whitewater, Washington demand an immediate solution to the town's first unsolved murder in decades. Police Chief Jack Tallon's only clue implicates Dharmaville, a controversial...

  • Chief Tallon and the S.O.R.

    A Chief Jack Tallon Mystery - 3

    GOOD AND EVILThe sleepy town of Whitewater is hosting the annual convention for the S.O.R., the Society for Open Relationships, an intimate group of radical sexual practitioners. As soon as television evangelist Ezekiel Moses finds out about it, he s...

  • Singapore

    A Virgil Tibbs Mystery - 6

    When Madame Motamboru, widow of the assassinated President of Bakara, is framed for murder in Singapore, she requests that her old friend Virgil Tibbs take part in the investigation. Because of U.S. interests in the area, Tibbs is cleared for passage...

  • The Van

  • The Kiwi Target

    Sent to New Zealand by his company to avert a hostile takeover, Peter Ferguson stumbles upon love, murder and laundered money. Then when he discovers a multi-million dollar scheme to turn a stretch of beautiful coastline into a parade of neon signs l...

  • Johnny Get Your Gun

    Johnny Get Your Gun (also known as Death for a Playmate) is the third in the Virgil Tibbs mystery series that began with In the Heat of the Night. In this story, a nine-year-old boy, lonely after a family move, shoots an older child who stole somethi...

  • Operation Springboard

    Chester Pawling, keenly interested in space travel, is invited to work at a base in the South Pacific where the great scientist, Dr. Havensson, is conducting highly secret experiments. That is just the beginning of a grand adventure that fulfils Ches...



  • Last Plane Out

    This is the gripping, compelling saga of men and their machines and their lonely women. Men who have only one goal -- get up in the sky in anything that flies!The Captain -- a man not to be grounded, determined to fly the last plane out of the war; J...

  • The Van: A Tale of Terror

    John Ball said of this novel: "The series of bizarre and frightful murders described in the pages that follow is based on an actual case, the complete file of which is shat­tering reading."The setting for the powerful story is the Los Angeles area. ...

  • Arctic Showdown

    A fierce Arctic blizzard, an emergency landing in the Alaskan wilds, a party of inexperienced newsmen -- and only a 16-year-old boy, using his Air Force Survival School training, between them and certain death.

    Young Andy Driscoll is perfectl...

  • Rescue Mission

    "The guy certainly knows his airplanes well and he held my interest very tightly as he developed the story." -- RICHARD BACH, author of Stranger to the Ground and Biplane

    The hurricane warnings were up in the Caribbean when Herb Stallings br...

  • The Winds of Mitamura

    In this haunting novel, John Ball returns to the setting he evoked so beautifully in his earlier success, Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms. Set against the exquisite landscape of rural Japan, The Winds of Mitamura weaves an engrossing contemporary s...

  • The Murder Children

    Here is a frightening, realistic novel of terror in the streets, of the growing power wielded by lawless youth gangs.

    When newly-promoted Lieutenant Ralph Mott of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was assigned to gang control in Ea...

  • One for Virgil Tibbs

    A Virgil Tibbs Short Story by John BallThrough the medium of motion pictures Virgil Tibbs has become known round the world. The first movie about him was "In the Heat of the Night" (1967), in which Sidney Poitier played the role of Virgil, and played...

  • Virgil Tibbs and the Cocktail Napkin

    Virgil Tibbs’s second case in short-story length -- another police procedural featuring the most famous black detective in fiction, the protagonist of that wonderful movie, “In the Heat of the Night” . . .All Virgil had as a clue was a cocktail...

  • Virgil Tibbs and the Fallen Body

    Here is the third short story about Virgil Tibbs, the famous black detective of "In the Heat of the Night." In this case Virgil Tibbs is a kind of professional onlooker, an innocent bystander lending a helpful hand; but it is Virgil Tibbs from the si...

Award-Winning Books by John Dudley Ball

In the Heat of the Night
1966 Edgar Allan Poe Award -- First Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

John Dudley Ball has published 28 books.

John Dudley Ball does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, One for Virgil Tibbs, was published in November 2016.

The first book by John Dudley Ball, In the Heat of the Night, was published in January 1965.

Yes. John Dudley Ball has 2 series.
Author Series
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