Mark McKay Books in Order

If you want the main Nick Severance series: A Terminal Agenda → A Trade To Die For → The Revenge Season → The Imperfect Assassin
If you prefer a more local mystery: The Absent Activist → The Yoga Murders
If you want political and tech driven suspense: The Brexit Affair → The Godzone Connection → The Ransom Note
If you want a standalone first: Dancing With Mortality

Mark McKay was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and his route into fiction was not a neat or early one. Before he became a novelist, he did a little of everything, including work as a van driver, wine salesman, psychiatric orderly, and even Santa Claus at a major department store. He also spent many years in the IT industry, which may help explain why technology, systems, and quiet competence show up so often in his books.

He later studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia in the UK. After that, he wrote his first novel and kept going. That first stretch of writing turned into a body of suspense fiction that moves between spy thriller, mystery, and political intrigue, usually with one key question underneath it all, what happens when decent people are pushed into bad situations and have to make hard calls?

It was not a straight line into thriller writing.

His first published novel, Dancing With Mortality, points to a lot of what would follow. Set against the conflict in Ireland, it links violence, politics, and long memories, and shows his interest in people who get caught inside forces bigger than themselves. McKay is clearly drawn to pressure points, the moment when private lives collide with public conflict, and someone has to decide whether to obey the rules or ignore them.

That same interest drives the Severance books, which begin with A Terminal Agenda. Nick Severance starts out as a London detective, but the series quickly widens beyond police work into conspiracy, espionage, and international danger. Books like A Trade To Die For, The Revenge Season, The Imperfect Assassin, and The Brexit Affair take him across countries and into cases involving buried secrets, intelligence work, engineered killers, and political instability. The scale gets bigger, but the stories usually stay anchored to one investigator trying to think clearly while everything around him gets messier.

McKay also writes at a more local, more intimate scale. In The Absent Activist and The Yoga Murders, he shifts to Norfolk and follows Ralph de Malmanche, a much less polished investigator whose cases begin close to home. These books still deal in danger and deception, but they do it through missing people, closed communities, awkward social ties, and the unsettling discovery that ordinary lives often contain secrets no one saw coming.

Across both series, a few patterns keep returning. McKay likes investigators, but not superhero versions of them. His protagonists are capable, yet they are often improvising, under pressure, and emotionally involved whether they want to be or not. He is also interested in the afterlife of old decisions. A secret from twenty years ago, a past allegiance, or one compromised choice can keep sending consequences forward.

He likes material that pushes people out of their comfort zone.

When he is not writing, he has said he is usually reading, trying to get better at guitar, looking for unusual experiences, and using aikido as useful research. He jokes that his goal as a guitarist is to get beyond three chords, and that his goal as a writer is to produce another fifty novels by the time he turns one hundred. He also says he spends far too much time hidden away at the top of the house, writing novels, which feels like exactly the sort of detail you would expect from someone who builds stories out of curiosity, observation, and all the odd jobs that came before.