Padre Books in Order

The Padre books are David J Gatward at his loudest, bloodiest, and most openly supernatural. If the Harry Grimm novels are rural police procedurals with a dark edge, Padre kicks the door off its hinges. The series starts with Mission Creep and introduces Alex Carter, an ex-SAS soldier who is now an army padre. That pairing is the whole hook. He is a priest, but he is also a trained killer. He knows scripture, but he knows combat too.

That tension drives everything.

Alex is not a gentle chaplain standing at the edge of the action and offering moral support. He is in the middle of it, and when the first book turns from military thriller into outright horror, he has to deal with both kinds of warfare at once. The battlefield is still there, but something older and nastier has joined in. Demons, occult forces, possession, and apocalyptic stakes all arrive fast, and the series never pretends it wants to play small.

By the time you move through Raised from Death and Jaws of Hell, the books have fully embraced what they are: short, brutal, fast-moving horror thrillers with an action-movie pulse. The scale keeps widening. What begins with soldiers under threat becomes a fight against something much bigger, with kidnapped children, Nazi occultists, demonic powers, and the possibility of catastrophe hanging over everything. These are books that like momentum. They do not pause for long, and they are not shy about gore.

But there is more going on than shock value. Alex works because he is built on contradiction. He has seen violence up close. He has committed it. He is a man of faith who keeps ending up in situations where faith is tested in the harshest possible way. The books ask what a priest is meant to do when prayer is not enough, when evil is not metaphorical, and when saving lives may mean doing terrible things. That gives the series a grim moral charge underneath all the gunfire and body horror.

The tone is very different from Gatward's detective fiction. Padre is pulpier, stranger, and much more supernatural. The plotting runs hot. The imagery is vivid and often savage. Readers who want neat realism, careful village procedure, or a cozy atmosphere should look elsewhere. Readers who enjoy military action fused with horror, though, will probably know within a few chapters whether this is their thing.

Because the books are short and closely linked, it makes sense to read them in order, starting with Mission Creep. This is really one escalating story rather than a set of loose standalones. If you want David J Gatward in demon-fighting, end-of-the-world mode, Padre is the series to pick up.