Don Bentley Books in Order

For Bentley's own series: Without Sanction → The Outside Man → Hostile Intent → Forgotten War.
For Jack Ryan Jr. and the Campus: Target Acquired → Zero Hour → Flash Point → Weapons Grade.
For Mitch Rapp by Don Bentley: Capture or Kill → Denied Access → Double Tap.
For one quick test run: Without Sanction → The Outside Man.

Don Bentley was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, but the path readers know best runs through engineering school, the Army, the FBI, and a lot of late nights trying to make a novel work. He earned a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ohio State, then later added an M.F.A. in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.

He was a thriller reader before he was a thriller writer. At fourteen, a friend handed him Red Storm Rising, and the mix of military detail, big stakes, and ordinary people under pressure stuck with him.

He did not go straight to a writing desk.

Bentley spent a decade as a U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilot, with postings in South Korea, Germany, and Texas. During a deployment to Afghanistan as a troop commander in support of Operation Enduring Freedom VI, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Air Medal with V device for valor. After the Army, he worked as an FBI special agent and served on the Dallas Office SWAT team. Later, he worked for companies building technology for the U.S. Special Operations community.

That matters on the page.

His writing career took patience. Bentley began writing young, kept at it through college and military life, and wrote several novels that did not sell. He studied craft, paid attention to what readers expected from action thrillers, and kept rewriting. The book that finally broke through was Without Sanction, published in 2020, the first Matt Drake novel.

Matt Drake gave Bentley a hero close to the worlds he knew: a Defense Intelligence Agency case officer carrying guilt from a failed Syria operation. The Outside Man, Hostile Intent, and Forgotten War build on that mix of field tradecraft, personal loyalty, battlefield memory, and trouble that follows operators home. Readers tend to come for the action and stay for Drake’s relationships with his wife Laila, his friend Frodo, and the people he feels responsible for saving.

Bentley also stepped into two major thriller worlds he grew up reading. In Tom Clancy’s Ryanverse, he wrote Jack Ryan Jr. novels including Target Acquired, Zero Hour, Flash Point, and Weapons Grade, sending Jack from Israel to Korea, the South China Sea, and a Texas case that turns global. He later joined Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series with Capture or Kill and Denied Access, with Double Tap scheduled as the next Don Bentley Rapp novel.

Across his books, Bentley comes back to service, debt, friendship, old wounds, and the hard choices made by people working where policy becomes action. His stories move fast, but they are usually grounded in a simple question: what does the job cost the person doing it?

Bentley lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.