Manon Tyler Books in Order

The Manon Tyler thrillers pick up some of the same concerns as the Liz Carlyle books but shift the centre of gravity to the CIA and to a new generation of threats. Manon is a young analyst whose specialty is making sense of fragmented intelligence on foreign networks that do not always look like traditional spy rings. When she is seconded to London, she finds herself working alongside British services that have their own priorities and blind spots.

In the first book, Manon arrives with a report on long‑term Russian 'illegals' – deep‑cover operatives who have lived for years under borrowed identities. She is quickly drawn into the story of a popular British politician whose past may conceal an abandoned Soviet agent, and of the one man who can prove it. What begins as an exercise in historical tidying turns into a race to stop a mole with direct access to the levers of power.

The second novel moves the focus from Moscow to Beijing and from embassies to university campuses. A gifted Chinese student, Li Min, is forced to transfer from Harvard to Oxford and drawn into an elite study centre that is quietly siphoning cutting‑edge research back to China. When the centre’s new director realises what is happening, he has no idea which of his colleagues he can trust, and Manon becomes his only lifeline into the Western intelligence world.

Across the series, the stakes are big but the stories stay close to individuals: students choosing between family pressure and personal ethics, officials tempted by power or money, and young officers like Manon learning how easily people can be used as assets. There is plenty of tradecraft – surveillance, cut‑outs, hurried meetings in safe houses – but also a sense of how exhausting it is to live behind a cover story or to be permanently on duty.

Because Rimington wrote these books late in her career, they are steeped in contemporary worries: interference in democratic politics, intellectual‑property theft, artificial intelligence and the challenge of defending open societies without becoming closed in the process. Manon operates in a world where data moves faster than diplomats and where the most important decisions may be happening in code rather than in embassies.

Taken together, the Manon Tyler novels form a compact, modern counterpart to the Liz Carlyle series. They are shorter, sharper studies of how Russian and Chinese ambitions play out in everyday institutions – parliaments, laboratories, lecture halls – and of the quiet professionals trying to stop things going wrong before anyone on the outside notices.