Hakan Veil Books in Order

The Hakan Veil books are set in the same harsh future as Thirteen, but shift the action to a battered, half terraformed Mars. Hakan Veil is a "hibernoid" Overrider, a man engineered from childhood to sleep for months on interplanetary freighters and wake only when something has gone badly wrong. When he comes out of hibernation he runs hot, burns through stored energy and solves problems with frightening speed and violence.

By the time readers meet him in Thin Air, that career has crashed. Veil has been exiled to Mars for refusing an execution order, abandoned by his corporate masters and left to hustle a living in the criminal backwash of the big colony city of Bradbury.

At the start of that novel he is offered what looks like an easy way home, bodyguard duty for an Earth Oversight investigator who has flown in to audit a suspicious lottery. The job goes bad immediately. The auditor, Madison Madekwe, starts tugging at threads that lead into Martian politics, organised crime and Earth Navy black operations, and Veil is pulled into a mess of kidnappings, riots and back room deals over who really controls the planet.

The follow up, Gone Machine, pushes those tensions even further. Veil is running on fumes when he is dragged into another emergency involving the missing child of a powerful Martian family, a charismatic tech cult leader thought to be dead and military grade weapons platforms falling out of the sky. Everyone insists Mars needs saving, but each faction has a different vision of what that salvation looks like and they are all willing to spend other people’s lives to get it.

Hakan is nobody’s idea of a clean hero, but he has a stubborn sense of what is fair that keeps getting him into trouble.

Like the Kovacs books, the Hakan Veil novels mix noir investigation with brutal action scenes and dense future worldbuilding. Where Thirteen looks at the way a fearful society creates and then cages a violent underclass, these stories stay with one of those engineered people as he tries to make choices outside the script he was built for.

Readers who enjoy grounded, street level science fiction, political intrigue and a main character who survives on equal parts body tech, bad temper and gallows humour will find a lot to explore here.