Kent “Rat” Rathman Books in Order

The Kent "Rat" Rathman books are built around a hero who works in the places where official lines blur. Rat is a Navy SEAL, but he is not boxed into one unit or one job. He moves through special operations, intelligence work, and White House channels, which gives the series room to shift from battlefield action to Washington intrigue without losing its center.

He is the guy people call when a problem is already bad and getting worse.

In The Shadows of Power, the spark is a dogfight over the Mediterranean. Navy pilot Ed Stovic shoots down an Algerian fighter and suddenly becomes a public symbol of American force at exactly the wrong moment. The dead pilot's brother, Ismael Nezzar, is pushed toward revenge by Islamic radicals, and the threat moves from overseas anger to a personal mission inside the United States. Rat knows Stovic personally, so this is not just another assignment. He is trying to protect a friend while also figuring out who is really steering events behind the scenes.

That first book shows what the series does best. The action moves between military aviation, surveillance work, intelligence chatter, and Washington offices where people with titles make dangerous decisions from a safe distance. Rat is comfortable in all of those worlds. He can work with operators, but he also understands how politics and image shape the mission. That makes him more than a standard action hero. He is also the lens Huston uses to show how national security choices get muddied by ego, rivalry, and back-channel power plays.

In Secret Justice, the tension gets sharper. Rat joins a Special Forces raid in Sudan that captures the terrorist Wahamed Duar, but the brutal interrogation that helps make the arrest soon turns into a legal crisis. Rat finds himself fighting for his future in secret proceedings at the same time that a larger threat, tied to radioactive material and the possibility of a dirty bomb, keeps building in the background. The series stops being only about stopping the bad guy. It also becomes about what happens after the mission, when lawyers, politicians, and international law step in.

Nothing stays clean for long.

Across both books, the real through line is not only whether Rat can stop the next attack. It is whether someone like Rat can still function once intelligence chiefs, prosecutors, and elected officials all start pulling on the same operation. These are fast, muscular thrillers with raids, jets, surveillance, and a lot of Washington fallout. If you like stories about operators working in morally gray territory, with every tactical move creating a political problem somewhere else, this series is very much in that lane.