Dan Eaton Books in Order

Dan Eaton was born in Carthage, Tunisia, across a square from a Roman amphitheatre. He grew up among the ruins and deserts of North Africa, an early landscape that still shows up in the history, faith, conflict, and far-flung settings of his fiction.

He studied classics and history at university, then built a working life well beyond the book world. His career has included journalism, defence, intelligence, and law enforcement, giving him a close view of the institutions, competing interests, and imperfect information that drive political thrillers.

Reporting came first. Eaton has described working as a foreign correspondent and later as a national affairs editor, experiences that gave him firsthand knowledge of the pressure to make sense of fast-moving events and the consequences when the story is wrong.

That tension sits at the center of his novels. His characters are often researchers, reporters, or ordinary people carrying information others would rather keep buried. The action can move from quiet homes to deserts, war zones, churches, and government offices, but the human problem stays familiar: what do you do when the truth is risky, inconvenient, or too late?

His first novel, The Secret Gospel, follows Cairo journalist Alex Fisher as an old manuscript and a disputed discovery pull him into a dangerous search across Egypt. The book draws on real debates around an alleged ancient gospel while keeping its focus on a modern race between people with very different reasons for wanting the text.

The past doesn't stay buried for long.

Eaton's standalone thriller No White Lies turns to New Zealand, where journalist Will McCormick has built a comfortable life on a story that was not quite true. When his young daughter is taken, Will has to face the deceptions, compromises, and international events behind his career. The novel uses its kidnapping plot to ask how far someone might go to protect a reputation, and whether honesty can still help once trust has gone.

In The Gospel of Echoes, Eaton returns to Alex Fisher, now a Cambridge theologian who also consults for MI5. A disappearance in Cornwall draws Alex toward clues involving ancient Greece, Nazi plunder, and his own family history. It continues Eaton's interest in religious history, modern extremism, and the uneasy overlap between private grief and public danger.

The Secret Gospel was shortlisted for the Rethink Press New Novels competition and reached the quarterfinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. No White Lies was a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards.

Eaton now lives in New Zealand. His books bring a reporter's eye for place and detail to stories where history is never merely history, and where one hidden fact can put a great many people in motion.