Max Stafford Books in Order

Max Stafford walks a line between boardrooms and back‑country tracks. When we meet him, he’s the owner of a London‑based security consultancy that handles corporate protection and anti‑espionage work, but he’s happiest when he’s in the field himself.

Stafford is tough and stubborn rather than slick: a former soldier whose marriage has fallen apart, who copes with stress by keeping moving and asking awkward questions. The two novels built around him, Flyaway and Windfall, show how easily a routine brief can turn into something much bigger and far more dangerous.

In Flyaway, a minor case becomes an obsession. An apparently unremarkable company accountant, Paul Billson, disappears after dipping into his employer’s funds. When Stafford starts checking, he’s beaten up in his own office—an overreaction that makes him dig deeper. Billson’s trail leads to North Africa and to a 1930s air race in which Billson’s aviator father vanished without trace somewhere over the Sahara.

Following that trail pulls Stafford into desert caravan routes, remote airstrips and the harsh politics of the region. Other, better‑funded groups are hunting the same wrecked aircraft, and Bagley uses Stafford’s point of view to mix desert survival, aviation lore and the slow reveal of why a forty‑year‑old crash still matters.

Windfall moves the action to East Africa and shifts the spark: a mysterious £40‑million legacy left to a small agricultural college in Kenya, and to two distant heirs who barely knew the dead millionaire. When one heir is nearly killed and a convincing imposter appears in England, a worn‑down private detective turns to Stafford for help.

The investigation forces Stafford into Kenya’s Rift Valley, where the supposedly worthy college, the conditions of the will and the local power structure all look less innocent than they first appeared. What begins as a question about inheritance law becomes a tangle of land, politics and old grudges, with violence waiting whenever Stafford gets too close to the truth.

Both books deliver the things readers often look for in Bagley: careful research, grounded action and a hero who solves problems with persistence as much as bravado. The Max Stafford stories add an extra layer of corporate intrigue, showing how boardroom decisions can echo out into deserts and highlands a long way from London.