Robert Hoon Thrillers Books in Order

The Robert Hoon Thrillers spin out of the DCI Logan novels and put one of that series’ loudest side characters front and centre. Robert "Bob" Hoon is a former soldier and ex Police Scotland detective superintendent with a foul mouth, a serious whisky habit, and a stubborn belief in justice that refuses to die.

When you meet him at the start of Northwind, Hoon’s life is hanging by a thread. Shunned by his old colleagues and working a dead end security job, he is dragged back into action when a Special Forces friend begs him to find his missing teenage daughter. The search leads from the Highlands to London and into the middle of a trafficking ring that has claimed far more victims than anyone wants to admit.

That first case gives Hoon something he thought he had lost, a purpose. In Southpaw he turns his attention to the Loop, the shadowy criminal cabal behind what he uncovered in Northwind. The Loop responds by sending highly trained killers after him, but Hoon being Hoon, he chooses to dig in and go undercover rather than run, vowing to bring the whole organisation down.

The trouble only escalates in Westward and the later books Eastgate and Stateside. Hoon faces an elite squad of assassins known as the Alphas, gets caught up in a Christmas hostage siege in an Inverness shopping centre, and eventually carves a destructive path across the United States while searching for a missing intelligence officer friend. The scale is bigger than in the Logan stories, but the stakes are always personal.

At its core, though, this is a series about a man who has done terrible things trying, in his own chaotic way, to leave the world slightly better than he found it.

Tonally the Hoon books skew closer to action thrillers than traditional police procedurals. There are still investigations and conspiracies, but the emphasis is on kinetic set pieces, bruising fights, and Hoon’s relentless, often hilarious internal monologue. The violence can be graphic, the language is definitely not polite, and the humour tends to be as dark as the subject matter.

You do not have to read the full DCI Logan series to enjoy these books, although long time readers will catch extra nods to shared characters and past cases. If you like morally complicated heroes, big hearted swearing, and thrillers that move from the Highlands to London, Las Vegas, and beyond, the Robert Hoon novels are designed to scratch that particular itch.