Holly Lin/Nova Bartkowski Thrillers Books in Order

This series starts with a great hardboiled hook. Holly Lin is a nanny by day and a non-sanctioned government assassin by night. From there the books open outward, bringing in old missions, shifting loyalties, cartel violence, and later the Nova Bartkowski novels, which spin out of the same dangerous world but carry their own flavor.

Holly is the emotional center. In No Shelter, a mission goes wrong, a teammate dies, and what looked like one job turns into something far more personal. Holly is deadly, but she is never written like a machine. She wants room for an ordinary life, and that tension drives the whole run. In The Devil You Know, she heads to Mexico to stop retaliation before it reaches her family. In Hollow Point, she has already tried to disappear into a quieter life in Texas, only to learn that the world she left has not stopped looking for her.

Nobody in this series gets to stay retired for long.

Nova Bartkowski adds a different kind of energy. He comes out of the same covert orbit, but his books feel more like stripped-down road thrillers. In Bullet Rain, he is newly free, driving a classic Mustang across the country, until a breakdown strands him in the Nevada desert town of Parrot Spur. In Bullet Country, he heads to Remington, Montana, to confront the father who abandoned him, and walks straight into a local conspiracy. Those books keep the action high, but they also give the series a lonely, small-town noir edge.

The prequel novella First Kill shows Holly at seventeen in Oahu, kidnapped and fighting to survive. It matters because Holly does not arrive fully formed. The series is interested in what this life costs, how people are pulled into it, and why leaving is so much harder than saying you are done.

Across the books you get assassins, covert teams, border crossings, desert towns, hidden compounds, and sudden violence. But the ongoing thread is loyalty. Who shows up for you, who sells you out, and who you still try to protect when the shooting starts. If you want sleek, fast action thrillers with a strong central character and a useful side route through Nova's books, this is a very easy series to get hooked on.

Start with No Shelter. After that, you can either follow Holly straight through or let the Nova books widen the world.