In Her Name: The Last War Books in Order

In Her Name: The Last War is where the larger saga begins. These books, First Contact, Legend of the Sword, and Dead Soul, show humanity's first disastrous encounter with the Kreelan Empire and the opening phase of a war that will echo through everything that follows. If you want the setup, the first major military clashes, and your first real look at Kreelan culture, this is the place to start.

The trilogy opens with discovery turning into nightmare. Humans think they have found promising new worlds, only to stumble into an ancient empire that does not greet strangers with diplomacy. The Kreelans are humanoid, but they do not feel familiar. Their society is shaped by warrior priestesses, rigid codes of honor, ritual combat, and a spiritual worldview that changes how they see every battle. That gives the books a nice mix of military science fiction and something stranger.

The recurring human side of the story is carried by characters like Ichiro Sato, Valentina Sikorsky, Roland Mills, and James Sparks. Hicks uses them to show the Confederation trying to survive an enemy it barely understands. In Legend of the Sword, the series widens from invasion to human political fracture, secret missions, and the danger of fighting a war while your own side is still sorting itself out. By Dead Soul, the cost of that war becomes painfully direct through Allison Murtaugh, a young girl forced to survive the fall of her world.

Tesh-Dar looms over the whole sequence. She is one of the most important Kreelan figures in the saga, and this is where readers first see why. She is terrifying, honorable, curious, and never as simple as the word villain would suggest. That complexity matters, because one of the best things about The Last War is that it does not treat the aliens as faceless invaders for long. Their motives are still alarming, but they have structure and belief behind them.

These books move fast.

Expect ship battles, covert operations, arena combat, colony worlds under siege, and plenty of tension between military necessity and personal survival. The trilogy does the heavy lifting of building the war, the mythology, and the human cast that later books will revisit from different angles. It also establishes the series habit of mixing spectacle with emotional fallout.

If you like first-contact stories that go bad almost immediately, with a strong military thread and an alien society that feels genuinely different, The Last War delivers that in a clean, readable run of books. It is the doorway into the whole In Her Name universe, and it gives you the war before the saga starts showing you the deeper scars beneath it.