William N. Walker

William N. Walker is a former U.S. Ambassador and the author of the Wages of Appeasement

series; novels of political intrigue set in 1930s Europe on the road to World War II. Readers have

bought more than 16,000 copies, left nearly 3,000 reviews, and often compared his work to Alan

Furst’s and Philip Kerr’s.

The series follows Paul Muller, a trilingual Swiss diplomat, through multiple crises, from the

Nazi pressure on Danzig in 1934 to Switzerland standing alone in 1940. The stories are based on

real events, many of them little known, and each book ends with an Author’s Afterword on the

history behind it. Walker’s novels evoke the atmosphere of the times: smoky bars, glittering

diplomatic events, violent street fights and high-stakes political tension. The sixth and final

novel, Encircled by War, is due out by the end of 2026.

Walker knows the world he writes about. In Washington, he served in the Nixon Administration,

where he had a close view of the political intrigue that brought down a presidency, and he later

directed the Presidential Personnel Office for President Ford. As U.S. Ambassador and Chief

Trade Negotiator in the Tokyo Round of trade talks, he lived in Geneva for more than two years,

the same city where, in his novels, the League of Nations once tried, and failed, to keep the

peace. As he puts it, the GATT was hardly the League of Nations, but international organizations

now, as then, are unwieldy and open to infighting and manipulation.

After government, he became a partner in a large Wall Street law firm, then founded his own

international business company, with work across Europe, the former Soviet Union, Turkey,

Central Asia, and the Middle East. He calls himself a recovering attorney.

A lifelong interest in the 1930s, and an admiration for Alan Furst’s novels, led him to the diary of

Sean Lester, the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. That diary became the

starting point for Danzig, the first book in the series.

He received Wesleyan University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. He is the father of three

grown children and lives in Leesburg, Virginia, with his wife, Janet.