Caine: Rapid Fire Books in Order

Caine: Rapid Fire is the leaner, punchier branch of Andrew Warren’s Thomas Caine world. These books are built like compact covert missions, with less room for detours and more focus on the job in front of Caine. They often look back to his CIA years or to gaps around the main series, showing the kind of work that made him so dangerous before Tokyo Black.

The setup is simple: put Caine on a mission, cut off the easy exits, and raise the cost of failure.

In Sandfire, Caine is still the CIA’s deadliest operative when a fellow agent is murdered, medicine vanishes from a UN shipment, and a cargo plane goes down in the Empty Quarter. The clues point toward a hidden operation that could shatter the U.S.-Saudi alliance and throw the Arabian Peninsula into war. It is a desert mission with personal stakes, because one of the dead is his own.

Depth Charge shifts the pressure to the water. Caine is assigned to protect a Chinese defector who can track a powerful stealth submarine, but the escort job turns into a fight involving Chinese assassins, a Colombian crime cartel, and a deadly cargo moving toward America. The book keeps the Rapid Fire idea clear: fast setup, hard pursuit, and no safe route home.

The later entries broaden that template. Lethal Action sends Caine after missing intelligence across Europe, Norway, and East Africa, with rival powers and another assassin in the chase. Sidewinder drops him into narco country, where a cartel leader is protecting a terrorist planning an attack on U.S. soil. Riptide continues the line as another Rapid Fire entry, best approached after the earlier missions.

This subseries is a good fit if you like Caine but want the stories in a sharper, mission-first form. The tone is still espionage thriller, with betrayals, covert orders, and international danger, but the pleasure is watching Caine think, improvise, and survive when the plan collapses.