Cassidy Books in Order

The Cassidy books take place in a battered future where rising seas and world war have squeezed humanity into a handful of dense cities behind giant seawalls. It is a cyberpunk setup, but a grimy, controlled one. Power rests with an AI built to guide the species through collapse, and its agents, called Shades, move through the streets in bodies that are not always their own.

That borrowed-body angle matters.

At the center is Cassidy, a Shade sent after a dangerous fugitive in New Manhattan. What starts as a manhunt turns into something much bigger, because the target is tied to secrets about the system Cassidy serves. The deeper he digs, the less stable his world becomes. The rules he has lived by stop looking like rules and start looking like restraints.

Across the trilogy, the series keeps pushing on questions of identity, control, and freedom. If your body can be replaced, your memories questioned, and the people in charge can reach into every corner of public life, what does it even mean to be yourself? Forbes does not treat those ideas like a lecture. He folds them into chases, betrayals, hidden histories, and a rebellion gathering force behind the scenes.

The tone is tense, fast, and suspicious. Cassidy is always having to reassess what he knows and who he can trust, and the books get a lot of mileage out of that pressure. There is action, but there is also a steady sense that the real danger is structural. The enemy is not just one killer or one corrupt official. It is the whole shape of the world.

If you like near-future dystopias with AI oversight, conspiracy plotting, and a lead who has to break his own programming to see clearly, Cassidy is an easy series to fall into. It is compact, high-concept, and built around one big question: when the truth finally shows up, what will it cost to act on it?