John Lawton Books in Order

London, 1944. As bombs still fall, a group of children playing on a bomb site uncover a severed arm, and Sergeant Troy traces it to a missing refugee scientist. His hunt exposes a covert operation involving German rocket experts, American intelligence and the shifting future of postwar Europe.

In 1956, at the height of the Cold War, Troy is assigned to guard Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during an official visit to Britain. When a Royal Navy diver turns up dead in Portsmouth Harbour, the case drags Troy into the darker corners of MI6 and into the arms of an old American flame.

England in 1963 is awash in sex, scandal and shifting power. While Troy is recovering from tuberculosis, a doctor he knows is charged with running a scandalous vice ring that touches politicians and spies, and a suspicious double suicide forces Troy back into the investigation.

During the early years of the Second World War, American agent Calvin Cormack is sent to London to track down a valuable German defector. Paired with a weary MI5 officer and romantically entangled with the man's daughter and Sergeant Troy, he stumbles into a trail of murder and divided loyalties.

In the long, hot summer of 1969, New York private investigator Turner Raines makes his living checking up on draft dodgers in Canada. When his journalist friend is murdered with an ice pick, Turner heads south to his Texas childhood and uncovers old secrets tied to the Vietnam era.

In late 1950s London a new breed of East End gangster pushes for power, and Troy is literally caught in the crossfire when a car bomb nearly kills him. As he recovers, old lovers and memories return, and he is drawn into a brutal turf war that echoes his own past.

Set on the eve of the Second World War, Second Violin follows Troy's older brother Rod from pre Anschluss Vienna to internment on the Isle of Man, while Frederick Troy investigates a series of murders of East End rabbis. Anti Jewish prejudice shapes every choice they make.

This novel links a young cello prodigy who survives Auschwitz, a Hungarian physicist drawn into the atomic bomb project and a 1948 murder on the London Underground. Inspector Troy has to trace how their wartime secrets collide in the uneasy peace that follows.

Jack Turner, an American who dodged the Vietnam draft and drifted into London, is surprised to be recruited by a literary agency in the mid 1980s. His first client is Roger Bentinck, a retired spy whose explosive memoir could upset the British establishment and put both men at risk.

Orphaned during the Blitz, young thief Joe Wilderness is recruited by British intelligence for his languages and criminal instincts and posted to ruined Berlin. There he juggles interrogations, a lucrative black market scam and a love affair, then years later is lured back for one last, far more dangerous job.

Former soldiers Ginger and Jack were torn apart by the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Twenty years later their reunion in Tuscany pulls them into a dangerous tangle of loyalty, betrayal and revenge, with Ginger's ex husband and a risky scheme in their way.

After a botched exfiltration in 1963 Berlin leaves a nuclear scientist dead, Joe Wilderness is pulled back into MI6 service instead of being left in jail. While a quiet metallurgist is sent east on a risky mission of his own, Joe navigates double crosses, prisoner swaps and Cold War showdowns.

In 1958, Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy runs into fugitive double agent Guy Burgess while on a family trip to Vienna. When an MI5 officer linked to Burgess is murdered, Troy is blamed and must untangle decades of friendship, spying and quiet betrayals.

Joe Wilderness begins by running small black market scams in divided Berlin, but an old acquaintance draws him into a dangerous investigation in 1960s Finland. Following a trail of cobalt and secret weapons, he ends up in Prague on the brink of the 1968 crackdown, where old plots suddenly converge.

Shifting between postwar Washington and late 1960s Europe, Moscow Exile follows socialite Charlotte and intelligence officer Charlie Leigh Hunt as they trade gossip and secrets in the shadow of the Red Scare. Years later Joe Wilderness, held by the KGB, becomes a bargaining chip in a rescue plan that leads back to Berlin's bridge of spies.

In 1950, Chief Inspector Troy learns that his sergeant is having an affair with the mistress of London racketeer Otto Ohnherz. Intrigued by Ohnherz's enigmatic lieutenant, a supposed camp survivor turned political donor, Troy investigates and uncovers a postwar world built on reinvention, secrets and stolen fortunes.