Colin Falconer Books in Order

In this sequel to Fever Coast, Lachlan McKenzie is drawn into the vicious struggle between European powers for control of India. From the killing grounds of Carnatic campaigns to the horror of the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Battle of Plassey, he must decide what kind of man he wants to be in the middle of empire’s rise.

Set in the last years of Muslim Spain, Converso follows men and women forced to choose between faith, survival and love as the Inquisition tightens its grip. From Seville’s dungeons to the gardens of the Alhambra, their stories play out against cannon fire and the final fall of Granada.

After Rome’s crushing defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC, tribune Valerius is taken prisoner and marched deep into the Parthian Empire, farther than any Roman has gone. While he endures shipwrecks, storms, pirates and betrayal in his bid to return home, civil war tears Rome apart and the friend who abandoned him rises in power.

East Africa, 1750 – Lachlan McKenzie lives with his family at a lonely trading post on the slave coast, never knowing why his father brought them there. When three warships sail upriver and destroy everything he loves, Lachlan survives by chance and sets out on a quest for revenge that leads him to the brutal slave markets and battlefields of India.

In early twentieth century Morocco, an ex soldier adventurer is hired to help the sultan put down a rebellion led by the warlord known as the Lord of the Atlas. Drawn into a world of mountain fortresses, caged lions and shifting loyalties, he discovers too late that he is fighting not just for money but for his life.

Someone is staging brutal executions outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice, leaving a severed head on the railings and a page from a book rammed down the victim’s throat. DI Charlie George hunts a killer who seems to be handing out his own verdicts, forcing the team to ask where the line lies between the law and true justice.

Two young women vanish from London’s streets in a single weekend, one of them a mother who disappears on her way home. As DI Charlie George races against the clock, a lucky CCTV hit gives him a suspect, but nothing about the case is straightforward and the bodies begin to mount while others try hard to keep the truth buried.

In 1913, Sarah Levine leaves her Russian village to join her husband Micha in New York, dreaming mainly of a child of her own. A baby girl arrives under heartbreaking circumstances, and as Sarah raises Liberty in a Lower East Side tenement and then in the world of fashion, a dangerous secret about her daughter’s origins shadows everything she builds.

When a schoolgirl is found dead in a North London park, DI Charlie George is swamped with suspects – from her family to classmates and strangers. He finally gets his man, only to see a sharp lawyer spring the killer on a technicality, and the case drags him into darker territory than he ever expected.

A priest is found crucified in a derelict chapel and, on Christmas Eve, a police officer goes missing and later turns up stoned to death. The religious overtones of the killings inflame a restless London, and DI Charlie George must hunt a ruthless murderer before anyone else dies a martyr’s death.

Bavaria, 1933 – Jewish teenager Netanel Rosenberg and Marie Helder fall in love just as Nazism begins to poison their small town. When Netanel becomes the last Jew left, hiding in cupboards and cellars, Marie refuses to abandon him, and his promise to “live for her” carries him through ghettos, camps and the machinery of the Holocaust.

Told in part by the wry ghost of her father, this novel follows Joan of Kent, a fourteenth century English princess who secretly marries for love after the king forbids it. Forced into bigamy and political marriages yet refusing to yield, she spends years defying her family, her court and her church in pursuit of the man she truly loves.

Kitty O’Kane escapes the grinding poverty of Dublin’s tenements determined to change her life and the world. Surviving the sinking of the Titanic, marching as a suffragette in New York and reporting from war torn Europe, she is always at the edge of history yet haunted by her own secrets and a first love she never quite leaves behind.

On a remote Solomon Islands outpost in 1941, hard drinking trader Patrick Corrigan is the last man anyone would choose as a hero. When the Japanese advance and the Americans need a coastwatcher left behind with a radio, Corrigan’s lazy exile turns into a chance at redemption that hinges on the safety of a missionary’s brave niece.

Set in the final years of the British Mandate, this companion to Live For Me follows characters on the Arab side of the struggle over Palestine. As villages are emptied and armies clash, love, loyalty and identity are torn apart and one family’s fight for their homeland collides with the birth of the state of Israel.

In war torn Saigon, Magdalena Fuentes moves through a city of soldiers, journalists and spies where every conversation may be a deal and every promise has a price. As her tangled relationship with Reyes Garcia plays out against the chaos of the Vietnam War, she must decide what she is willing to sacrifice for love and survival.

Now exiled from Cuba, Magdalena Fuentes tries to reinvent herself amid the palm trees and smog of 1960s Los Angeles. Drawn into a world of movie people, activists and gangsters, she discovers that old lovers and enemies have followed her, and that the past she fled Havana to escape is not nearly finished with her.

Havana, 1958 – spoiled, beautiful Magdalena Fuentes believes she is destined to marry golden boy Angel Macheda until he takes her virginity and calmly announces his engagement to another woman. As revolution brews and the city’s underbelly erupts, she finds herself dangerously drawn to Reyes Garcia, an older man with murky loyalties who may be her ruin or her salvation.

A band of Norse settlers follows the wake of Leif Eriksson, hoping to claim new lands across the ocean, but their leader is haunted by strange visions. Far to the south on a small Caribbean island, a shaman foresees the arrival of pale haired “gods” who will save her people from brutal enemies, only to find that the newcomers may bring ruin instead of salvation.

Set around the fabled island of Zanzibar, this adventure drops a European outsider into a world of clove plantations, slaving dhows and coastal intrigue. As tribal loyalties, empire politics and personal vendettas collide, he is pushed toward a dangerous reckoning under a blood red tropical moon.

Seville, 1489 – as the Reconquista nears its end and the Inquisition tightens its grip, an artist and a woman bound to the wrong man are drawn together. Their love plays out against sieges, betrayals and the fall of Granada, forcing them to choose between safety, faith and a passion that could destroy them.

In Elizabethan London, where spies and scholars mingle with actors and tavern drunks, a mysterious death tied to a circle of radical thinkers pulls Shakespeare’s world into danger. Secrets buried in forbidden manuscripts and whispered meetings after dark force a small band of players and scribes to become reluctant detectives.

A captivating woman with a shadowy past steps into Shakespeare’s orbit just as a powerful patron’s household is rocked by murder. As jealousy, politics and desire knot together, the informal “detective agency” around the playhouse must untangle a case where the wrong move could mean the scaffold.

Reeling from a broken relationship and unable to give the child his lover longs for, young doctor Adam escapes to a tiny Mexican town for a working sabbatical. There he hears stories of a feared local bruja and, half in jest, asks her to help him win his lover back, only to find that such bargains can carry a terrifying cost.

Babylon, 323 BC – Gajendra is a young elephant handler whose courage catches the eye of Alexander the Great and propels him into the heart of the Macedonian army. As Alexander turns his gaze west toward Carthage, man and elephant are swept through sieges, palace plots and betrayals that may decide the fate of an empire.

Zion charts the intensifying conflict as underground armies organize, British authority crumbles and Jewish and Arab communities are pushed toward open war. Families on both sides are forced into impossible choices about loyalty, home and whose claim to the land they are prepared to defend with their lives.

Combat photographer Sean Ryan walks away from a Vietnamese woman he has made pregnant and spends decades trying not to look back. Years later his “war baby” forces her way into the lives of Ryan and his friends, confronting them with the long shadow of a conflict they thought they had left behind.

Bringing the Naked trilogy to a close, this book follows Magdalena into wartime Saigon, where journalists, soldiers and spies crowd the bars and boulevards. As rockets fall and deals are made in smoke filled rooms, she discovers that love in a war zone is as dangerous as any bullet.

Collecting the LA chapter of Magdalena Fuentes’s saga, this volume follows her attempt to start over in 1960s California. Amid sunshine, studio backlots and protest marches, she learns that a new name and a new city are not enough to escape old loves, debts and enemies.

This edition brings together the story of Magdalena Fuentes’s first great mistake in love and the revolution that destroys her gilded Havana life. It covers her affair with Angel, her dangerous connection to Reyes Garcia and the way politics and passion entwine in 1950s Cuba.

Set in the city that bridges Europe and Asia, Istanbul weaves together lives separated by centuries but bound to the same streets, mosques and palaces. Past and present love affairs, betrayals and quests for faith collide, showing how one city can hold a thousand histories at once.

In the final Jerusalem novel, the British depart, the United Nations draws lines on a map and full scale war erupts. As cities fall and villages empty, characters readers have followed from earlier books see their world remade in blood, exile and fragile new beginnings under a new flag.

Married to England’s King Edward II at twelve, French princess Isabella arrives in a foreign court convinced she is in love. Discovering her husband’s consuming attachment to his favourites, she must learn to survive a hostile court and, finally, to seize power for herself in a gamble that will topple a king.

The final Opium novel shows the Southeast Asian drug trade fully grown – a ruthless, multinational business that leaves addiction and corruption in its wake. As old pilots, enforcers and agents face the wreckage of what they helped build, a last ruthless deal tests who, if anyone, can walk away clean.

The second novel in the Jerusalem sequence follows two young women from very different backgrounds whose futures become bound to the struggle over Mandate Palestine. As protests flare, friendships fracture and violence spreads, their private loves and losses mirror a land being torn in two.

Hong Kong, 1992 – Ruby Wen has stolen a heroin shipment, planning to sell it on and disappear, but someone has double crossed her. Owing money to a deadly triad enforcer and pursued by an American DEA liaison and a driven local cop, she becomes the spark for a brutal gang war in a city on the brink of change.

Patrick Corrigan has always preferred running away from trouble to facing it, until war and duty finally catch up with him. Thrown into a mission where his courage matters more than his charm, he must decide whether this is the moment he stops drifting and risks everything for someone other than himself.

As Hong Kong counts down to the end of British rule, young detective Sian Lacey and haunted DEA agent John Keelan are forced into an uneasy partnership. Their only hope of bringing down a major drug ring lies in Ruby Wen, a woman who owes money to the worst kind of people and plays everyone she meets.

The first book in the Jerusalem series introduces Holocaust survivor Netanel and Arab families who already call the land home. Set against rising tension under British rule, it shows how refugees seeking safety and locals fighting for their own future become locked in a struggle neither side can easily escape.

In this follow up to Opium, the small time trafficking of mountain valleys has grown into a lethal business carried by bush pilots, corrupt officials and hungry syndicates. As one risky flight after another ferries drugs out of Southeast Asia, loyalties fray and everyone involved learns just how hard it is to get out alive.

A seemingly successful man walks out of his comfortable marriage after an affair cracks open the life he thought he wanted. Told with raw honesty, the novel follows his attempt to start over and asks whether the pursuit of passion is worth the wreckage it leaves behind.

Bucharest during World War Two is a city of diplomats, secret police and shifting alliances. British agent Nick Jordan falls for Daniela Simonici, a Jewish woman kept as the mistress of a German businessman, and draws her into espionage that could save lives but may cost her freedom or worse if they are exposed.

France, 1205 – battle scarred knight Philip of Vercy returns from crusade to find his wife dead and his little son close to dying. Desperate, he rides south in search of a mysterious young woman bearing Christ’s wounds, only to be swept into the brutal crusade against the Cathars and a love that could cost him his life and soul.

Set in the dangerous world of the global pearl trade, this saga follows divers, traders and the women who love them from remote islands to glittering cities. Ambition, greed and desire collide as a single string of extraordinary pearls changes more than one life.

Returning to the hidden world behind Ottoman palace walls, Seraglio tells of concubines, eunuchs and princes locked in a deadly dance for power. A young woman sold into the harem learns to navigate intrigue, passion and betrayal in a place where one wrong move can mean exile or death.

Shanghai, 1921 – when journalist Michael Sheridan hauls a half drowned Russian girl from the Whangpoa River, he is struck by how much she resembles the murdered Grand Duchess Anastasia. Together they chase the truth of her identity from China to Berlin, London, Soviet Russia and New York, discovering that the past is harder to outrun than either imagined.

Called out to a basement where a young woman lies dead on a bondage rack, DI Madeleine Fox is too tired to be shocked – at first. The case of a murdered dominatrix with a powerful client list seems open and shut, but as she digs deeper Fox finds herself in a world where desire, violence and the temptation to take justice into your own hands are dangerously intertwined.

A European knight travels east along the great caravan routes to the court of a powerful khan, trading cold stone fortresses for deserts, mountains and cities of silk and spice. Along the way he becomes entangled in love, war and a clash of cultures that will change him more than any battle.

In the ruthless early days of the East India trade, a young captain and the woman who loves him are drawn into a web of company politics, piracy and private deals. Monsoon seas, crowded ports and hidden harbours form the backdrop to a story of ambition, betrayal and the price of empire.

This novel follows Cleopatra from her precarious youth in Alexandria through her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Balancing court politics, family treachery and her own desires, she fights to keep Egypt independent even as Rome tightens its grip on the Mediterranean world.

In the first DI Madeleine Fox novel, a Yardie drug dealer is shot in his car and a twelve year old girl is murdered in an alley. Officially the cases are unconnected, but as Fox and her burned out boss struggle with slick defence lawyers and apathetic juries, talk inside the squad room turns from doing their jobs to helping justice along by other means.

Buenos Aires, 1976 – a middle class family’s comfortable life shatters when the military junta’s secret police come in the night. Spanning two decades, the novel traces the fate of those who “disappeared,” the loved ones left behind and the reckoning that comes when buried crimes finally surface.

War photographer Sean Ryan and idealistic correspondent Hugh Webb share a volatile friendship that survives Vietnam, El Salvador and Bosnia. As they chase stories and outrun bullets, their love for the same woman and their different ideas of courage push them toward a final, dangerous choice.

This edition collects Falconer’s powerful retelling of the fall of the Aztec Empire, charting Malinali’s journey from highborn girl to slave, consort and reluctant agent of history. Through her eyes readers see Cortés’s march, Montezuma’s court and the bloody birth of a new world.

Told through the eyes of Malinali, an Aztec noblewoman sold into slavery and later taken by Hernán Cortés as his translator, this novel recreates the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Revered by some as the symbolic mother of a new nation and reviled by others as a traitor, she must choose sides as gods, prophecy and gunpowder bring an empire down.

Set in Hong Kong, Triad plunges into the uneasy relationship between the local mafia, corrupt officials and those who try to stand against them. A story of drugs, loyalty and betrayal, it follows characters on both sides of the law as a single deal sparks a chain of violence neither side can fully control.

Laos in the 1960s is a forgotten corner of the world where warlords, intelligence agencies and opportunists quietly build a heroin pipeline. A handful of pilots, villagers and agents think they can manage the trade or profit from it, only to find themselves trapped in a game that will spread far beyond the jungle hills.

This edition of Harem, also published as The Sultan’s Harem, offers Falconer’s full, sensual portrait of Suleiman the Magnificent’s inner court. It follows the slave girl who becomes his obsession and the deadly intrigues her rise unleashes among wives, concubines and princes.

Harem opens the doors of Suleiman the Magnificent’s palace to tell the intertwined stories of three women – Hurrem, a slave girl of Tartar origin, Julia, a kidnapped Italian noblewoman, and Gulbehar, mother of the heir. In a world of silks, secrets and sudden violence, their rivalries and alliances help decide the fate of an empire.

In the Pacific during World War Two, a misfit trader on a remote island is recruited as a coastwatcher charged with reporting Japanese movements. As the enemy closes in and those he cares about are threatened, he must find the courage to stand his ground in a war he never meant to fight.

Told through interlocking stories on both the Jewish and Arab sides, Fury traces how ordinary people are swept into the violence that births the state of Israel. Survivors, villagers, soldiers and refugees collide as anger, faith and grief fuel a conflict that offers no easy heroes.

Drawn from the author’s own time in Southeast Asia, Venom follows a young expatriate caught up in Bangkok’s nightlife and the heroin trade that runs beneath it. What begins as adventure slides into a deadly game involving smugglers, corrupt officials and a drug that destroys everything it touches.