Brannigan's Blackhearts Books in Order
Part ofPeter Nealen Books in OrderExplore Brannigan's Blackhearts by Peter Nealen in order, with quick summaries, series background, and help choosing the best starting book.
Last updated: June 10, 2026
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Publication Order
14 books
Kill Yuan
by Peter Nealen
2016
Widowed former Marine Dan Tackett signs on for a rich counter-piracy job in the South China Sea. The mission turns into a brutal hunt for a renegade Chinese captain, with rival forces closing in from every side.
Fury in the Gulf
by Peter Nealen
2017
Retired Marine Colonel John Brannigan takes one more impossible job when terrorists seize a tiny Gulf kingdom and hold Americans hostage. With a handpicked mercenary crew and no backup, he goes in anyway.
Burmese Crossfire
by Peter Nealen
2018
Brannigan's team heads into northern Burma for a deniable search-and-destroy mission in the middle of civil war, heroin routes, and great-power games. The deeper they go, the bigger the stakes become.
Doctors of Death
by Peter Nealen
2018
A missing WHO team and villages dying from mysterious plagues pull the Blackhearts into Chad. What starts as a rescue mission turns into a chase through disease, private armies, and a widening conspiracy.
Enemy Unidentified
by Peter Nealen
2018
Coordinated attacks kill hundreds across the American Southwest, and no one even knows who claimed them. Brannigan's Blackhearts are sent onto an oil rig in the Gulf, where the bullets are only part of the danger.
Frozen Conflict
by Peter Nealen
2018
A hunt for a notorious arms broker drags the Blackhearts into Transnistria, a gray-zone pocket full of soldiers, smugglers, and bad odds. They are chasing answers before the terrorists erase the trail.
High Desert Vengeance
by Peter Nealen
2018
This time the job is personal. When cartel violence hits Mario Gomez's family, Brannigan's crew crosses into the high desert to settle the score and try to bring his sister home.
Kill or Capture
by Peter Nealen
2019
The Blackhearts finally know the enemy behind the mask, and they take the hunt to South America. But chasing a fleeing Humanity Front target into the altiplano may be exactly the trap their enemies want.
Enemy of My Enemy
by Peter Nealen
2020
A rising jihadist wants former Soviet backpack nukes, and the money trail leads to Azerbaijan. Brannigan's Blackhearts step into a dirty mission where Russian interests, local fighters, and hidden agendas collide.
Blood Debt
by Peter Nealen
2021
When a black-bag raid on a hidden base in Kyrgyzstan goes catastrophically wrong, only one man knows where the prisoners were taken. That man is Dan Tackett, and retirement is over.
War to the Knife
by Peter Nealen
2021
A rogue strongman turns a jungle border city into a narco-funded nightmare, and the Blackhearts are sent in dark to remove him. Killing the target may be the easy part.
Concrete Jungle
by Peter Nealen
2022
A favor to underworld power broker Erika Dalca drags the Blackhearts into a dense urban operation where mafia rivals and larger forces are closing in. The city gives them nowhere easy to disappear.
Marque and Reprisal
by Peter Nealen
2022
Ships with valuable cargo are vanishing far from the usual pirate waters. Brannigan's crew signs on for what looks like a routine escort and finds a far more dangerous enemy waiting offshore.
Legacy of Terror
by Peter Nealen
2024
When a military junta seizes a U.S.-flagged cargo ship, the Blackhearts are hired to break out a dissident and spark regime change by proxy. The problem is that the rebels may not be much better.
Series background & context
Brannigan's Blackhearts is Peter Nealen in mercenary-adventure mode. The series follows John Brannigan, a retired Marine colonel who gets pulled back into the fight when official channels either cannot act or do not want the fingerprints. He builds a handpicked crew of hard men and specialists, and together they take on jobs that sit somewhere between rescue mission, black operation, and open act of war.
That gives the books their rhythm. A crisis breaks out. Politicians hesitate, or somebody needs a solution they can disown later. Brannigan and his people step in. Fury in the Gulf sets the tone with a hostage rescue in a tiny kingdom in the Persian Gulf, and later books carry the Blackhearts into Burma, the Gulf of Mexico, Transnistria, cartel country, Chad, Central Asia, and beyond.
The appeal is not just the travel, though. It is the team.
Brannigan is the center, but the series depends on the men around him, their grudges, their specialties, and the way they watch each other's backs when a mission goes bad. These are professionals who know exactly how ugly the work can get. The books are fast and direct, but they also make room for the loyalty that keeps a mercenary outfit from coming apart under stress.
There is also a longer arc underneath the individual missions. What starts as one-off deniable work grows into a broader shadow war involving terror networks, criminal power brokers, covert sponsors, and enemies who do not stay neatly inside one border or one ideology. The later books get a little bigger and a little darker as the team realizes that separate jobs are part of the same mess.
So expect a series that feels a little more openly pulp-driven than American Praetorians, but still grounded in practical detail and team dynamics. The gunfights are blunt, the missions are global, and the stakes are usually immediate: get in, get the people, kill the target, get out alive. Sometimes they even manage that.
If what you want is a veteran-led mercenary series with momentum, banter under pressure, and the constant possibility that one bad job will set off three more, Brannigan's Blackhearts delivers exactly that.
Edited by
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