https://www.patrickoster.com/blog daily 0.75 2024-08-28 https://www.patrickoster.com/blog/Blog Post Title One-5y9nc monthly 0.5 2024-08-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615759335390-MNOOIG4V471O6WUHMZVD/DSCF8718.jpg blog - New: The Man Who Fell in Love With His Wife https://www.patrickoster.com/home daily 0.75 2021-03-01 https://www.patrickoster.com/new-page daily 0.75 2021-02-27 https://www.patrickoster.com/welcome daily 1.0 2024-08-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/b9758d4b-905c-43e6-ad5b-23c0f7938f3c/Screenshot+2024-08-20+at+2.54.39%E2%80%AFPM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/0a95d7ca-24b6-4f0a-9c06-7361e1ddf3f9/Unknown.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/8a951ac6-8c20-4743-beb1-20c0c2cb7d77/gold.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/8a951ac6-8c20-4743-beb1-20c0c2cb7d77/gold.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1616529915314-EVQNY1DWJCPE35PEZ5R4/DSC_0001-1.jpg welcome - ABOUT THE AUTHOR LIFE. 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. "The Amazon Detective Agency," a straight murder mystery, pits a plus-size wannabe detective who is moonlighting on the overnight shift of the U.S. Supreme Court police force against the killer of a liberal justice she finds dead while doing her rounds. OnlineBookClub.org called it "a delightfully fun mystery. Lots of laugh-out-loud humor. A wonderful book." 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. https://www.patrickoster.com/biography daily 0.75 2021-03-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615938828094-C47WHQ7PQSPIAXZLIWF1/Untitled+23.png biography - Patrick Oster Aside from summer jobs working in a dirt-floor cement factory or operating a jackhammer, Patrick Oster began earning a living as a lawyer, working on antitrust and international trade matters. Looking for something more down-to-earth, he became an investigator for the Better Government Association in Chicago, working with local newspapers to uncover waste and corruption. One of those papers, The Chicago Sun-Times, hired him to investigate the local criminal courts, a job that let him use his law background and later snag a spot with U.S. News & World Report covering the U.S. Supreme Court and the Justice Department. He went back to the Sun-Times in its Washington bureau, covering the same high-court beat. A year later, he was promoted to bureau chief of a 7-reporter team. As chief, he was assigned to cover the White House, first during the administration of Jimmy Carter and then that of Ronald Reagan. Part of his job was to cover national security, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and foreign policy. He traveled on his own to dozens of countries to get the -on-the-ground story behind presidential policy. He was shot at and almost blown up in Central America covering civil wars there. The Russian government made him an enemy of the state after a series of stories on the crippling weaknesses of the Soviet Union, a country Reagan had warned was a powerful evil empire. There were pleasanter assignments, such as covering meetings of government leaders in Paris or Rome with access to five-star hotels and 3-star Michelin restaurants Among more exotic venues, he had a nice stay in Bali to cover a foreign-ministers meeting that focused on the plight of the Vietnamese boat people,. The accompanying photo shows him, in pre-laptop days, typing out his dispatches on his trusty Olivetti portable, a tropical drink not far away from his bamboo fan chair in his villa at a luxury resort. Along the way, he won awards for his legal reporting, for his commentary on Reagan's approach to combatting communism in Central America and on the waste in Reagan's defense build-up. After a disagreement with the new management at The Sun-Times, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1984, he was fired and wound up as Mexico City bureau chief for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. His assignment: Latin America. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his coverage of the twin earthquakes in Mexico and wrote "The Mexicans," a non-fiction book about 20 Mexicans whose lives were representative of conditions in that important U.S. neighbor. The book was picked as a Book-of-the-Month-Cub selection and reviewed favorably by the New York Times and other major publications. On the advice of his book editor, he eventually turned his interest to writing novels, using the real life stories he had observed as a journalist to form the bases of fictional stories that ring true to life. In collecting the real-life fodder for his novels, he covered major events in Europe, such as the formation of the European Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall for Business Week and the Washington Post. Returning to his expertise in legal journalism, he directed coverage of dozens of white-collar and cyber-crime stories, including the massive fraud perpetrated by conman Bernard Madoff and major hacking of U.S. companies by Chinese and Russian operatives. In his personal life, he settled with his wife, son and dogs in Croton-on-Hudson, a river town just 45 minutes commute along the famed river. Making that trip for a couple of decades gave hm the idea for his first novel, a comic thriller called "The Commuter.” https://www.patrickoster.com/the-commuter daily 0.75 2021-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615746544599-G99YTU4CD7Y62MNKWZ4M/34669040._SY475_.jpg The Commuter https://www.patrickoster.com/the-german-club daily 0.75 2021-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615747173885-Q09D9D2ZH6C23I0POIAB/1863340708.jpeg The German Club https://www.patrickoster.com/the-hacker-chronicles daily 0.75 2021-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615748110106-PZTP7CSSB5USOLVHEG0L/41PP8GktrNL.jpg The Hacker Chronicles https://www.patrickoster.com/the-amazon-detective-agency daily 0.75 2021-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615757254089-CDTUA5ARXBAB9NC3RJXI/619596892.jpeg The Amazon Detective Agency https://www.patrickoster.com/the-obituary-writer daily 0.75 2021-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615757740224-QRLCOFWNYUKCDFA97WQV/1747576170.jpeg The Obituary Writer https://www.patrickoster.com/the-mexicans daily 0.75 2021-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6036db4139bc1235a8b1bfa5/1615758647517-V40JJWP3659SE4YGBVBI/51O8vFCSgiL.jpg The Mexicans https://www.patrickoster.com/the-sleeper-list daily 0.75 2024-07-27