Paul Samson Books in Order

The Paul Samson books pick up many of Henry Porter’s long‑running concerns—refugees, surveillance, Russian influence, the power of money—and push them into a very contemporary espionage series. Paul Samson is a former MI6 officer with Lebanese roots and fluent Arabic, now making a precarious living as a private investigator when the Service pulls him back into its orbit.

In Firefly, Samson is asked to find a boy who has slipped away from a refugee camp on a Greek island. The boy, Naji, is about thirteen and carries in his head an extraordinary store of intelligence about an ISIS cell and its plans for Europe. Terrorists are tracking him along the migrant routes into the EU; border guards, police and traffickers are closing in as well. Samson’s task is to pick up the trail, earn Naji’s trust and get him to safety in time.

The chase that follows runs from overcrowded camps and safe houses to mountain passes and border crossings, and the book never forgets that behind the spy story lies the larger crisis of people being forced from their homes. Samson’s experience of Lebanon’s civil war, and his ability to move between cultures, matter as much as his training with British intelligence.

White Hot Silence brings back characters from the first book and shifts the focus to a different kind of threat. Anastasia, the psychologist who once worked with refugees and shared a brief relationship with Samson, has married Denis Hisami, a billionaire whose fortune grew out of a guerrilla past. When she is kidnapped on a lonely Italian road and wakes on a cargo ship, Denis is arrested in the United States and effectively removed from the board. Samson has to navigate mafias, mercenaries and opaque financial structures to reach her, uncovering a scheme that uses hidden money to undermine democratic systems.

In The Old Enemy, the past closes in. Samson’s small security job watching a gifted young data specialist suddenly explodes into violence, while elsewhere Robert Harland is murdered and Denis Hisami is poisoned with an exotic nerve agent. The trail leads to a former Stasi officer and a web of Russian and Western assets who have embedded themselves in business, politics and technology platforms. Samson and Anastasia find themselves working through old Cold War grudges that have been repurposed for a new era.

These books are fast and outward‑looking, taking readers from London and Washington to the Greek islands, the Balkans and the Baltic. Underneath the set‑pieces and manhunts runs a steady interest in how individuals hang on to decency when states, corporations and extremists are pushing in the opposite direction.