Sam Bourne Books in Order

If you want the full Maggie Costello arc: The Last Testament → The Chosen One → To Kill The President → To Kill the Truth → To Kill a Man.
If you enjoy religious or historical thrillers: The Righteous Men → The Final Reckoning → Pantheon.
If you like near-future political suspense: The 3rd Woman then dip into the Maggie Costello books starting with To Kill The President.
If you prefer non-fiction and history: Bring Home the Revolution → Jacob's Gift → The Escape Artist → The Traitors Circle.
If you want a single starting point: Try The Righteous Men for a standalone, or The Last Testament to meet Maggie Costello.

Jonathan Freedland writes thrillers under the name Sam Bourne, folding his years in journalism into fast, idea-rich stories about power, faith and politics.

He grew up in a Jewish family in north London, the youngest of three children and the only son of journalist and biographer Michael Freedland and Israeli-born Sara Hocherman. At University College School in Hampstead he was already drawn to news, often tagging along when his father recorded radio programmes, including one memorable encounter where comedian Eric Morecambe jokingly assumed the ten-year-old was married. After a gap year on a kibbutz in Israel with the Habonim Dror youth movement, he went on to Wadham College, Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics, editing the student paper Cherwell and sharpening the skills that would anchor his career.

Freedland’s first reporting jobs took him through several classic Fleet Street training grounds. He worked at the short-lived Sunday Correspondent, then joined the BBC in 1990 as a news reporter across radio and television, before winning the Laurence Stern fellowship on the Washington Post and later serving as the Guardian’s Washington correspondent from 1993 to 1997. Back in London he settled into a rhythm that many readers now know well: a weekly Guardian column, regular contributions to other papers and magazines, and BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series The Long View, along with awards such as Columnist of the Year in 2002, the David Watt Prize in 2008 and a special Orwell Prize in 2014.

Alongside that day job he began to write books. His early non-fiction titles Bring Home the Revolution and Jacob’s Gift mix reportage, travel and memoir, arguing that Britain could borrow some of the United States’ democratic habits and tracing three generations of his own family to ask what Jewish belonging looks like in the modern world.

Then came Sam Bourne.

Under that pen name he launched The Righteous Men, a religious thriller about a New York reporter pulled into Kabbalah, prophecy and a string of ritual murders, followed by The Last Testament and The Final Reckoning, which connect biblical riddles and Holocaust-era revenge to present-day conflicts. These books established his blend of propulsive plots with big questions about justice, memory and faith.

Maggie Costello, the peace negotiator and Washington troubleshooter introduced in The Last Testament, soon became the spine of a whole sequence of political thrillers. In novels such as The Chosen One, To Kill the President, To Kill the Truth and To Kill a Man, she navigates smear campaigns, a volatile populist in the White House, coordinated attempts to burn the record of history and the fallout from #MeToo, letting Freedland explore democracy, fake news and abuse of power through a character who refuses to look away.

Freedland has also written thrillers under his own name, notably Pantheon, which uncovers a wartime eugenics scheme linking Oxford evacuees to Yale, and The 3rd Woman, a near-future story set in a United States overshadowed by Chinese economic and military might. Both books reflect the same preoccupations as his journalism, asking how grand political ideas land on individual lives.

More recently he has turned back to narrative history with The Escape Artist, about Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, and The Traitors Circle, which follows a small network of German resisters betrayed to the Gestapo, combining archival research with the pacing of a suspense novel.

He continues to live in London with his spouse, radio and podcast producer Sarah Peters, and their two sons, balancing family life with a steady output of columns, broadcasts and books. Whether you pick up a Sam Bourne thriller or one of his non-fiction titles, you are likely to find the same core interests at work, from the fragility of democracy to the long echo of 20th century history.