Mark Henshaw Books in Order

If you want the spy series from the beginning: Red Cell / Assassin's Mace → Cold Shot → The Fall of Moscow Station → The Last Man in Tehran
If you want Russia and Cold War tension: The Fall of Moscow Station → The Last Man in Tehran
If you want Middle East flashpoints: Cold Shot → The Last Man in Tehran
If you want his history writing: Forty Years

Mark Henshaw is a Virginia writer whose work sits at the meeting point of intelligence, history, and research. He grew up in the Commonwealth, surrounded by places like Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg, Monticello, Mount Vernon, and Civil War battlefields, and that early closeness to the past stayed with him. He now lives in Leesburg, Virginia, with his family.

Before fiction, there was school and then government work. Henshaw earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Brigham Young University in 1995, followed by master's degrees in business administration and international relations in 1999. He also completed the Sherman Kent School's Advanced Analyst Program, which fit neatly with the career he was building.

He spent more than sixteen years as a CIA analyst and served in the agency's Red Cell think tank, a unit built to challenge standard assumptions and push analysts toward uncomfortable possibilities. That work brought him eighteen Exceptional Performance Awards, along with the Director of National Intelligence's Galileo Award in 2007 for innovation in intelligence analysis. His day job was serious, but it also trained him to notice systems, motives, and the small details that make high-pressure decisions feel real.

That turned out to be perfect material for fiction.

Henshaw has said he talked for years about writing a novel before his wife finally pushed him to start. After he received a cash award at work, she urged him to use it to buy a laptop and finish the book he kept postponing. The first draft of Red Cell / Assassin's Mace took much longer than the original one-year challenge, but it eventually became his debut novel and the start of his best-known series.

That series introduced readers to Kyra Stryker and Jonathan Burke, a field officer and an analyst who do not exactly make life easy for each other. In Red Cell / Assassin's Mace, they are thrown into a crisis involving China, Taiwan, and a secret weapon. Readers who click with Henshaw's thrillers usually come for the same things: believable tradecraft, office politics that matter, and the sense that intelligence work is often about thinking under pressure, not just chasing people with guns.

The books widen from there. Cold Shot sends Burke and Stryker into an Iranian nuclear plot with roots in Venezuela. The Fall of Moscow Station shifts toward Russia, defection, and the wreckage left by a blown network. The Last Man in Tehran adds mole hunting, Mossad, Iran, and a CIA institution under stress. Even when the stakes are global, Henshaw keeps one eye on the people doing the work, mentors and proteges, bruised careers, and the cost of getting a call wrong.

Research matters to him.

That shows up outside the spy novels too. Henshaw also wrote Forty Years, a sweeping history of the building of the Salt Lake Temple, a subject that fits his longstanding interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century American history. Off the page, he has written about enjoying computer programming, tabletop war games, the culinary arts, and a perhaps unhealthy amount of Bruce Hornsby music. That mix, analyst, history buff, hobbyist, and novelist, goes a long way toward explaining why his books feel both carefully built and very lived-in.