David Martini Books in Order

The David Martini books sit early in Raymond Sawkins' career, before the Tweed novels became his best known work, and you can feel him testing the shape of the modern thriller. Martini is not an intelligence officer with government backing. He is a private investigator and, in his own way of putting it, a negotiator, the man people call when something needs handling quietly and showing up in person may be a bad idea.

That difference gives the series its angle.

Because Martini works for private clients, the cases feel personal even when the stakes grow political. In Wreath for America, he is asked to help a hunted man who holds the Corder Index, a list tied to an industrial espionage ring. In Night of the Hawk, a wealthy Swiss client pulls him into a plot that threatens Switzerland's neutrality and brushes up against American and British interests. By Bombshell, the trigger is the murder of a friend, a jet-engine expert killed in Switzerland, and the investigation widens into a series of bombings and a much larger conspiracy.

Martini moves through these stories like a professional outsider. He is smart, observant, and harder than he first appears, but Sawkins does not make him invincible. He can handle himself in a fight, yet the real draw is his judgment. He reads rooms well. He knows when a client is hiding something. He knows that money, politics, and fear usually travel together. That gives the books a nice tension, because Martini is always close enough to the powerful to see how they operate, but never fully protected by them.

He talks like a man who expects trouble and has already priced it in.

The settings help a lot. These are cool, continental thrillers full of Switzerland, border crossings, hotels, private meetings, and pressure that builds behind polite conversation. Sawkins was already drawn to travel, atmosphere, and the mechanics of danger, and you can see the later Forbes style forming here. The books are shorter and leaner than the big Tweed novels, but the instincts are already in place: bad news arrives in fragments, the wrong people know too much, and a case that starts as one thing turns out to be something wider and dirtier.

There are only three David Martini novels, which makes the series easy to read straight through. It also means Martini feels a little like a missing branch of Colin Forbes' career, a version of the author who might have stayed closer to the private-eye thriller if he had wanted to. Instead, these books became a bridge. They carry some of the caution and casework of the early Snow novels, then push toward the more international conspiracies of Tweed and Co.

If you want Forbes before he settled into his longest-running formula, David Martini is a very good place to look. The books are brisk, clever, and full of quiet suspicion.