While working at Harvard, he wrote Spirals (Houghton), a novel set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the early days of cloning and recombinant DNA research.[2] His next work of fiction was Blood Winter (Viking Press), a thriller about germ warfare; The Wall Street Journal described it as "A dazzling achievement, both gripping and moving, lurid and achingly sad….as authoritative as the fresh early best of Greene and le Carre".[3]
In 1991, he published Iron John: A Book About Men which was number one on The New York Times Best Seller list for ten weeks, and remained on the list for more than a year.