Radiants Books in Order

Radiants is David B Coe in thriller mode. These books leave behind castles and old kingdoms for a recognizably modern world where a small number of people carry dangerous mental gifts, and where the most frightening thing may be what ordinary institutions decide to do with them.

The first book, Radiants, centers on DeDe Mercer, who can control other people's thoughts. She has spent years hiding what she can do and watching over her younger brother, knowing that his own power will eventually surface as well. Once federal agencies start closing in, secrecy stops being safety and starts feeling like a trap.

That pressure is the engine of the series.

Coe treats the gifts here less like superhero powers and more like forces that warp trust. If someone can steer a thought, cloud a decision, or push a person into action, then every relationship gets unstable. Family loyalty matters more. Consent matters more. Privacy becomes something fragile. The books do not forget the human cost of that for very long.

The second book, Invasives, widens the lens. It shifts into a rougher New York story, following homeless teens living in subway tunnels who stumble into murder, money, and the hidden world of other Radiants. That change of cast gives the series a broader reach. What began as one woman's fight to protect herself and her brother turns into a larger picture of who gets used, who gets discarded, and who learns too late that powerful people have been watching all along.

The tone lands somewhere between supernatural thriller and paranoid chase novel. Agencies watch too closely. Wealthy players pull strings from a distance. People on the margins see more than anyone expects, but surviving long enough to prove it is another matter. Even when the pace is fast, the books keep circling back to the same question: what happens when extraordinary ability collides with systems that view human beings as tools?

If you want David B Coe at his most contemporary and least interested in easy comfort, this is the series to try. It moves quickly, but it also stays uneasy in the right ways. Power is real, secrecy is brittle, and nobody gets to pretend that being special automatically makes life better.