Killer Intent Books in Order

Tony Kent's Killer Intent series sits where political thriller, legal thriller, and action novel meet. The books begin in London, then widen into a bigger map that reaches the United States and mainland Europe. What stays constant is the feeling that public chaos is usually being driven by private power, and that the people trying to stop it are carrying a lot of damage themselves.

These books move fast.

Joe Dempsey is the series' engine. He is a highly trained intelligence operative, a man with a violent past and the skills to match it, and he keeps getting pulled toward crises that official systems are too slow, too compromised, or too frightened to handle cleanly. Michael Devlin brings a very different kind of pressure. He is a Belfast-born criminal barrister based in London, sharp in court and dangerous outside it, with a family history that means crime is never something he studies from a safe distance. Around them are Sarah Truman, a driven American journalist who keeps digging into stories other people want buried, DCI Joelle Levy, and later Eden Grace, a former Secret Service agent who becomes one of Dempsey's key allies.

At the heart of the series is a simple question: what do you do when the people meant to protect the system are part of the problem, or at least too tangled up to act in time?

That question changes shape from book to book. Killer Intent throws Dempsey, Devlin, and Sarah together during an assassination plot and a wider attack on the British state. Marked for Death turns inward, into London's legal world, where old sins and personal revenge collide. Power Play pushes the action into American politics after a deadly plane explosion. No Way To Die brings in domestic terrorism, radioactive material, and a ticking-clock hunt across the United States. By The Shadow Network, the series is working on an even broader canvas of war crimes, espionage, vanished witnesses, and double agents.

Trust is always in short supply.

What makes these books hang together is not just plot, but tone. Kent writes with the pace of an action thriller, but the legal detail, intelligence tradecraft, and criminal underworld all feel rooted in real systems. London matters, especially early on, because the courts, media rooms, and corridors of power give the stories their shape. As the setting expands, the books still keep one foot in that same grounded world of procedure, paperwork, and professional risk. If you like thrillers with big conspiracies, recurring characters, and enough courtroom and intelligence detail to make the danger feel believable, this series is a good place to settle in. Best of all, it rewards reading in order, because the scars, loyalties, and grudges do not reset at the end of each novel.