Liam Devlin Books in Order

Liam Devlin is one of Higgins’s signature creations: an Irishman shaped by conflict, suspicious of everyone, and still oddly guided by his own private rules. The Devlin books bridge two eras of Higgins storytelling—World War II adventure on one end, and modern counter-terror thrillers on the other. If you like protagonists who can be both ruthless and unexpectedly principled, Devlin is a good bet.

Devlin first arrives in The Eagle Has Landed at the center of a desperate wartime plan. A German commando raid needs local knowledge and someone who can move through Britain without drawing attention, and Devlin—an Irish Republican with his own grudges against England—fits the bill. He becomes the link between a highly trained military unit and the messy reality on the ground: accents, safe houses, local politics, and the simple problem of where to hide in plain sight. Higgins builds the suspense around clashing loyalties: Devlin isn’t fighting for a flag so much as for his own sense of scorekeeping and survival.

Everything is a bargain with consequences.

The Eagle Has Flown returns to that world, with the fallout of the earlier mission and the same mix of military professionalism and personal obsession. The story keeps Devlin in the orbit of intelligence agencies and soldiers who think they can control him—right up until they realize he always has another exit. Even if you don’t read it as a direct sequel, it carries the Devlin mood: people making ruthless choices while pretending they’re still in control.

Years later, Devlin shows up again in Higgins’s contemporary thrillers, older and harder to surprise. In Touch the Devil, Devlin and the British spymaster Charles Ferguson are racing to stop an assassination plot tied to the IRA, with a target whose public appearances make him almost impossible to protect. The tension comes from proximity: Devlin has to move inside the same communities the plotters are using, where history and resentment make every conversation loaded.

Confessional pushes the stakes onto an even bigger stage, with a rogue, highly trained killer planning an attack that could ignite global fallout. Devlin becomes the man sent into the dark corners—where intelligence services, terrorists, and old comrades all want the same person for different reasons—and he has to decide what he’s willing to do to stop it. It’s part manhunt, part meditation on what a “good” outcome even means in this line of work.

Read these in order if you can: The Eagle Has Landed → The Eagle Has Flown → Touch the Devil → Confessional. Taken together, they show why Devlin lasts on the page: he’s a survivor, a realist, and—against his better judgment—someone who sometimes chooses the harder right over the easier wrong.