Maggie Costello Books in Order

Sam Bourne’s Maggie Costello novels follow an Irish-born peace negotiator turned Washington troubleshooter who keeps being dragged back into crises when politics, history and personal conscience collide.

As a character, Maggie combines professional skill and personal mess. She is brilliant at reading a room, stubborn about fairness and painfully aware of the compromises she has already made in her career, carrying scars from diplomatic missteps, romantic entanglements and years inside the Beltway.

The series opens in The Last Testament, when she is pulled out of semi-retirement to rescue a fragile peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians after a man is shot at a Jerusalem rally and archaeologists around the region begin dying in suspicious ways. Following a trail from West Bank settlements to refugee camps, Maggie uncovers an ancient tablet that could upend both modern politics and religious belief.

In The Chosen One, Maggie has moved into the White House as an adviser to President Stephen Baker, a leader she thinks finally matches her ideals. When scandal-hunter Vic Forbes starts dropping damaging revelations about Baker and is then found dead, she is forced to ask whether the man she works for is a reformer or a fraud, and why a decades-old secret is worth killing to protect.

Every book pushes her into a fresh moral knot rather than repeating the same case with different window dressing.

To Kill the President pitches her against a volatile demagogue in the Oval Office and an insider plot to remove him, forcing her to weigh loyalty to constitutional process against the risk of global catastrophe. To Kill the Truth widens the canvas, as historians are murdered and great libraries burn in a coordinated attempt to erase the record of slavery, the Holocaust and other crimes, while To Kill a Man brings the focus back to one woman, Natasha Winthrop, a rising civil-rights lawyer who kills a masked intruder in her own home and becomes the centre of a vicious political and media storm. Through all of this Maggie acts as investigator, fixer and conscience, probing how far you can bend the rules in order to defend them.

The overall tone is contemporary political thriller, grounded in real debates about populism, fake news, historical denial and gendered violence but told through chases, conspiracies and tight ticking clocks. Expect high-stakes plots rooted in Washington and the Middle East, a heroine who is sharp and fallible rather than flawless, and stories that keep asking what it costs an ordinary person to stand up against the stories powerful people want the world to believe.