Michael Newton

Michael Newton (1951 to 2021) was an American author and journalist born in Bakersfield, California, who worked as a high school teacher and bodyguard before turning to writing full-time. Extraordinarily prolific, he published 357 books over his career, including 258 novels, and began his fiction career as a ghostwriter on Don Pendleton's The Executioner men's-action series before continuing to contribute further volumes and installments of related series, including The Destroyer, under his own name and house pseudonyms. Alongside his action fiction, Newton wrote extensively researched nonfiction, including reference works on true crime and serial killers and a history of the Ku Klux Klan in Florida that won the Florida Historical Society's Rembert Patrick Annual Book Award; his Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology won an American Library Association Outstanding Reference Work award in 2006.