Psi War Books in Order

Psi War is one of Rick Partlow's big crossover-style projects. It pulls together threads, characters, and consequences from several earlier series and turns them into a wider crisis. If Birthright, Recon, and Tales of the Acheron are separate fronts of his future history, Psi War is where those fronts start crashing into each other.

The spark comes from an alien artifact and everything attached to it.

The series begins with Korri Fontenot and her great-granddaughter Jackie, but it does not stay small for long. Ancient powers, buried empires, and a transformation virus that starts changing ordinary people into psionic war gods push the story into full catastrophe mode. By the time Conflagration gets moving, the scale is enormous and the cast has widened to include several of Partlow's key recurring players.

That could have become cluttered, but the books work because the danger is easy to understand even when the continuity gets dense. Civilization is breaking. The military cannot hold the line the old way. People who were already dangerous are becoming something else entirely. Old heroes and old grudges both matter.

This is probably not the best first Partlow series to read if you are brand new to him. It lands better when you already know Caleb Mitchell, Randall Munroe, and the Acheron-side characters. But if you do, Psi War has the payoff of a larger shared-universe event without getting lost in lore.

Start with Homecoming and read straight through.