James McGee Books in Order

James McGee was born in Kent and spent much of his childhood moving with an Army family. School took him to Gibraltar, Germany, and Northern Ireland, a start that gave him a lasting appetite for new places and the people who inhabit them.

His early working life was anything but a straight line. After leaving school, he worked for Barclays Bank, then moved to British Airways in Revenue Accounts. He also sold for a newspaper group before joining Pan Am's Crew Operations Department at Heathrow, a job that suited someone already keen to see more of the world.

Travel was never a side note in his life.

McGee travelled through Europe, the Caribbean, the United States, the Middle East, Japan, Thailand, and Australia. Along the way, he began to feel the pull of writing. His first novel, Trigger Men, arrived in 1985 and follows mercenaries caught up in a dangerous East African mission. It was followed by Crow's War, about a helicopter pilot stranded in wartime Afghanistan, and Wolf's Lair, a thriller that links a wartime U-boat mystery to a modern search for lost treasure.

Those early books show the ingredients McGee would keep returning to: people under pressure, unfamiliar territory, military history, and plans that go wrong very quickly.

Writing full time did not immediately pay the bills, so McGee returned to regular work. He spent time in bookselling with Waterstones, travelled again through the United States and Australia, and later became a store manager for Ottakar's Booksellers. It was during that bookselling period that he wrote Ratcatcher, the first novel to feature Matthew Hawkwood.

That book changed the direction of his career.

Hawkwood is a former soldier working as a Bow Street Runner in Regency London, at a time when Britain is fighting Napoleon. In Ratcatcher, a robbery and murdered naval courier open onto a larger conspiracy. Later books send Hawkwood into the trade in stolen corpses in Resurrectionist, aboard brutal prison ships in Rapscallion, and into espionage in Rebellion. The series blends investigations with chases, fights, political pressure, and the rougher corners of early nineteenth-century life.

The success of Resurrectionist allowed McGee to leave his bookselling job and focus on writing. His life away from the desk has also included book-review broadcasts, teaching English as a foreign language, photography, hiking, golf, sailing, and more travel, including time on a South African game reserve and a visit to Machu Picchu.