Jareth Hicks Books in Order

The Jareth Hicks books take a slightly different route through Matthew Hattersley's thriller world. They are still full of danger, gunfire, and people with ugly intentions, but the center here is not an assassin or an undercover spy. It is a former soldier who keeps trying to step away from violent work and keeps getting pulled back because somebody needs help.

Jareth Hicks has a background in military operations and black ops style missions, and that history never really leaves him. When we meet him in The Death Factory, he has traded that life for quieter work, or at least quieter on the surface. Then his ex-lover turns up at his door. She was also his CIA handler, and she needs his help finding her sister, who has vanished into a cult led by the charismatic and deeply dangerous Memphis Pope.

That first book sets the tone.

Hicks is good at infiltration, reading a room, and doing what needs to be done when things go bad. But the series is not built around swagger. What stands out is his reluctance. He does not throw himself into risk because he enjoys it. He does it because he knows what happens when capable people look away. In The Death Factory, that means going undercover inside a desert compound where the rules are controlled by a leader who knows how to turn belief into a weapon.

Two Wolves keeps the same moral engine, but in a more grounded criminal setting. A friend asks Hicks to look into the man hanging around his estranged wife and teenage daughter, Luna. The concern is real. The trail leads to Ruben Rivers and to a darker network tied to a figure known as the White Wolf. What starts as a quiet check-in becomes a rescue mission, and Hicks finds himself facing the kind of predators who hide behind money, menace, and the hope that decent people will stay out of their way.

The stakes stay close to the bone.

That is probably the clearest description of what these books are doing. Even when the setup involves cults or shadowy criminal operators, the emotional driver is personal. Hicks is not trying to save the world in the abstract. He is trying to get one missing woman out alive, or protect one frightened girl, or stop one group of cruel men before they do more damage. That keeps the tension tight and the violence purposeful.

If Acid Vanilla is Hattersley's wild, sharp-edged antihero series, Jareth Hicks is the steadier cousin. These books lean more toward rescue thriller and covert action, with a capable lead who carries his past quietly. They read well on their own, but together they sketch a man who keeps searching for ordinary life and never quite gets to keep it. If you like hard-driving thrillers with a strong moral center, Hicks is a good place to start.