Raymond Khoury Books in Order
See all Raymond Khoury books in order, with reading guides, series overviews, story summaries, and suggestions on where to start his historical thrillers.
Last updated: June 7, 2026
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Publication Order
16 books
The Encoder
by Raymond Khoury
2006
Opening the graphic novel saga, The Encoder jumps between Acre's final stand in 1291 and a modern raid on New York's Metropolitan Museum. As masked riders steal a centuries-old decoder, Tess Chaykin and FBI agent Sean Reilly are pulled into the hidden history of the Knights Templar.
The Last Templar
by Raymond Khoury
2006
At a glittering museum gala, four horsemen dressed as Knights Templar storm the galleries and steal a mysterious medieval decoder. Archaeologist Tess Chaykin and FBI agent Sean Reilly follow the trail across continents toward a buried Templar secret that could upend accepted Christian history.
The Sanctuary
by Raymond Khoury
2007
From a Templar prison in 1705 to a hidden lab in war-torn Baghdad, a burned book and a serpent symbol link centuries of ruthless experimentation. Geneticist Mia Bishop races to uncover a secret about human longevity before it can be turned into a weapon.
The Sign
by Raymond Khoury
2009
When a shimmering globe of light appears over a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf on live TV, reporter Gracie Logan becomes the face of a supposed miracle. As the phenomenon spreads, she and ex-con Matt Sherwood chase clues toward a high-tech plot that manipulates faith and fear.
The Templar Salvation
by Raymond Khoury
2010
A cache of forbidden manuscripts smuggled out of besieged Constantinople holds answers the Church has buried for centuries. When terrorists kidnap Tess Chaykin, FBI agent Sean Reilly must raid the Vatican's secret archives and race across Europe to find the Templar record that could decide her fate.
The Devil's Elixir / Second Time Around
by Raymond Khoury
2011
FBI agent Sean Reilly is yanked from his quiet life when former DEA agent and old flame Michelle Martinez calls, convinced a Mexican cartel wants her dead. Their hunt for a sadistic kingpin and a legendary hallucinogenic drug drags them into Reilly's buried past and a conspiracy with world shifting stakes.
The Knight in the Crypt
by Raymond Khoury
2012
Continuing the investigation into the museum attack, Reilly races to locate the surviving knights before mysterious assassins silence them. Meanwhile, archaeologist Tess Chaykin follows a Templar trail through ancient crypts, convinced the stolen device is tied to a secret far bigger than the FBI suspects.
Rasputin's Shadow
by Raymond Khoury
2013
In 1916, a Siberian mine erupts in inexplicable violence witnessed by a secretive scientist and Rasputin himself. Decades later, FBI agent Sean Reilly investigates a Russian diplomat's fall from a New York window and a missing teacher, uncovering a Cold War mind-control device ruthless players will kill to possess.
Pit Stop: Sean Reilly vs. Glen Garber
by Linwood Barclay
2015
In this crossover novella, FBI agent Sean Reilly is chasing an online extortionist threatening to unleash a lethal biological agent. When the fugitive hijacks contractor Glen Garber's truck with his teenage daughter trapped inside, Reilly and the panicked father must work together to stop catastrophe.
Shadow Tag
by Raymond Khoury
2016
FBI agent Sean Reilly and Cotton Malone are sent to London after American specialists vanish and chatter hints at a looming terrorist attack. The short adventure plays with both men’s histories as they uncover a plot that turns out to be far more personal than expected.
The End Game
by Raymond Khoury
2016
While tracking a DarkNet site where people barter for murder, Sean Reilly meets a stranger who claims his father's long-ago suicide was staged. As he digs deeper, Reilly collides with a hidden network of assassins and a cover-up that turns him into a fugitive from his own agency.
The Falcon Temple
by Raymond Khoury
2017
In the climax of the first arc, Tess sails with Vance to locate the wreck of the Falcon Temple and its guarded cargo, convinced the truth must surface. At the same time, church officials enlist Reilly to bury that truth, setting up a violent showdown on storm-tossed Mediterranean waters.
The Sunken Church
by Raymond Khoury
2017
After a harrowing abduction, Tess Chaykin refuses to stand aside and officially joins Reilly's team. Her research on the Templars sends them to remote ruins and a drowned church, even as hidden enemies close in and the accumulating evidence begins to shake Reilly's faith.
The Devil's Handiwork
by Raymond Khoury
2018
Shifting to the events of The Templar Salvation, The Devil's Handiwork opens with Templars looting Constantinople's imperial library, then jumps to Reilly's covert visit to the Vatican archives. His search for a hidden Templar dossier pulls Tess into a new conspiracy that powerful factions will kill to suppress.
The One-Armed Knight
by Raymond Khoury
2018
Reilly tracks the impostor Professor Sharafi to Turkey, only for the man to escape and seize Tess once more. As a chase unfolds across the hills of Cappadocia, Tess follows the trail of Conrad the Templar and the treasure he protected, racing to keep a world-shaking secret out of zealots' hands.
The Ottoman Secret
by Raymond Khoury
2019
In an alternate 2017 where the Ottoman Empire still rules Europe, state investigator Kamal Agha is ordered to hunt a tattooed stranger who kills by the Seine. Following the trail, Kamal uncovers a time-bending secret about how this world was made, forcing him to choose between loyalty and rebellion.
Where should I start?
If you want to start with the Templar conspiracy: The Last Templar → The Templar Salvation.
If you prefer a standalone historical-science thriller: The Sanctuary.
If you like big global mysteries with a sci-fi edge: The Sign → The Ottoman Secret.
If you want the full Sean Reilly arc: The Last Templar → The Templar Salvation → The Devil's Elixir → Rasputin's Shadow → The End Game.
Author bio
Raymond Khoury was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and spent his early childhood there before the civil war forced his family to leave. At fourteen he moved with his parents and siblings to Rye, New York, swapping Mediterranean heat for suburban high school life and learning, very quickly, what it meant to start over in a new language and culture.
After graduating from Rye Country Day School, he did something most parents would dread. He went back to war-torn Lebanon to study architecture at the American University of Beirut. Between studio classes and exams he lived through bombardments, ceasefires, and power cuts, experiences he has described as harrowing and formative rather than purely bleak.
In those years he also paid the bills and exercised a different artistic muscle by illustrating children's books for a regional educational publisher. It was quiet work set against a very loud backdrop, and it hinted that he was as drawn to storytelling as he was to designing buildings.
When fighting flared again in the early 1980s, Khoury was evacuated from Beirut by U.S. Marines and found himself back in Europe looking for a more stable life. A brief stint at a small London architecture firm led to business school in Fontainebleau, where he earned an MBA at INSEAD, and then to a job in London investment banking.
It was an unlikely place to discover he was a writer. Through work he met a Wall Street banker who wrote screenplays on the side, and together they developed a movie idea. When the outlines coming back from a hired screenwriter missed the mark, Khoury tried sketching his own version. The result was strong enough to be shortlisted for a Fulbright screenwriting fellowship, as was the semi autobiographical script he wrote next about his student years in Beirut.
On the strength of that early work he optioned Melvyn Bragg's novel The Maid of Buttermere and wrote the adaptation, a project that briefly had Robert De Niro attached before stalling in development. By then he was working full time as a screenwriter and producer, contributing scripts to British television dramas such as Spooks and Waking the Dead and learning how to pace a story for the screen.
During that period he poured a huge amount of research into a spec screenplay about the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. That script, which became The Last Templar, made the rounds for years before an agent pushed him to turn it into a novel. Khoury had already turned down an earlier book deal that would have stripped out the story's religious questions, and when he sat down in 2002 to adapt the tale on his own terms it took three years. Published in 2005, The Last Templar became an international bestseller, spent months on major lists, and was later adapted into both a television miniseries and a graphic novel series.
He followed it with a string of thrillers that mix high stakes plots with big what if ideas. The Sanctuary links a Templar era mystery to modern bioweapon research and the science of longevity. The Sign opens with a glowing sphere of light over Antarctica and explores how media, faith, and politics collide when the world thinks it has seen a miracle. In later Reilly novels like The Templar Salvation, The Devil's Elixir, Rasputin's Shadow, The End Game and The Ottoman Secret (also published as Empire of Lies), the FBI agent and his archaeologist partner Tess Chaykin move from Vatican archives to Mexican cartel country, Cold War laboratories, and an alternate Europe ruled by an Ottoman empire.
Across all of these books certain threads repeat. There is usually a buried document or device, a powerful institution with something to hide, and ordinary people forced to decide what they are willing to risk for the truth. The tone stays grounded, with action scenes shaped by his screenwriting background and research woven into brisk dialogue rather than long lectures.
Khoury now divides his time between Beirut, London, and Dubai, writing both novels and scripts. The settings and questions in his fiction grow out of the places he has lived, the wars he has watched up close, and a long running curiosity about how belief, power, and personal loyalties collide.
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