About Joe Looby

For Joe Looby, The Tenth Series began with his father.

Jim Looby served with the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division in World War II, earning the Bronze Star and Purple Heart during the campaign in Italy. As a boy, Joe attended the division’s reunions, stayed in veterans’ homes, and skied and hiked with their children. He remembers their stories, their jokes, and their kindness. Only later did he begin to understand what his father—and the men beside him—had carried home from the war.

That search became The Tenth Trail Mark, The Tenth Station, and The Tenth Command. Spanning World Wars I and II, the novels draw on historical events to explore courage, friendship, love, and the ways one generation’s experiences shape the next.

A U.S. Navy veteran, Joe brings his fiction into the present with The Window, a standalone geopolitical thriller. Drawing on his naval experience and publicly available research, the novel follows the people behind America’s military commitments—from factory floors and Pentagon offices to a destroyer in the Western Pacific. Its characters carry responsibilities to their country, their crews, and the people waiting for them at home.

Joe is also the filmmaker behind The Year of the Tiger: JFK 1962, a documentary about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Through Kennedy’s White House recordings, the film follows a president weighing choices in Cuba that could put lives at risk in Berlin. Across film and fiction, Joe explores the human decisions that shape larger events.

An avid hiker and skier, Joe lives near Charleston, South Carolina, and often returns to Lake Placid, New York. In May 2026, he and his wife, Connie, climbed Mount Belvedere together, walking the ground where his father had fought more than eighty years earlier.

See you at the top.