Scott Brodie & Maggie Taylor Books in Order

Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor are Army Criminal Investigation Division special agents working cases that sit at the messy intersection of military duty, politics, and personal conscience. Co-written with Alex DeMille, their books feel like a modern echo of Nelson DeMille’s own Vietnam-era experience, updated for today’s wars and technologies.

In The Deserter they are thrown together for the first time and sent to Venezuela to find Kyle Mercer, a celebrated Delta Force captain who walked away from his post in Afghanistan and later appeared in Taliban propaganda videos. Officially their mission is simple: track Mercer in Caracas and bring him home for court-martial. Unofficially, no one tells them exactly what Mercer knows or why some people might prefer he never reaches American soil.

Brodie is older, irreverent, and comfortable bending rules; Taylor is newer to CID, more by the book, and carrying her own combat scars. Their chemistry is built on clashing instincts, wary attraction, and shared frustration with higher-ups who treat them as expendable. As they move from the capital’s corrupt streets into the jungle, they learn that desertion, loyalty, and patriotism look different depending on who is telling the story.

Blood Lines reunites them in Berlin after months apart. A fellow CID agent has been murdered in a park on the edge of the city’s Arab refugee community, and local authorities are quick to blame terrorism. Brodie and Taylor are not so sure. Their investigation takes them through immigrant neighborhoods, old Stasi haunts, American bases, and bureaucratic turf wars, uncovering secrets that touch both Germany’s past and the quiet operations of U.S. intelligence.

In The Tin Men the pair are dispatched to Camp Hayden, a remote Army facility in the Mojave Desert where Rangers are training alongside prototype autonomous combat robots. The official job is to determine whether the camp’s chief scientist died in a tragic accident or something more deliberate. Cut off from the outside world and surrounded by stressed soldiers, ambitious officers, and experimental machines, Brodie and Taylor dig into a mystery where the line between human error and programmed intent is dangerously thin.

Across the series, case files double as debates about modern warfare: what desertion means in long, open-ended conflicts, how far militaries will go to protect their image, and what happens when decision-making shifts from fallible people to software. The tone stays recognizably DeMille, with sharp dialogue and black humor, but the settings and technology place Brodie and Taylor firmly in the twenty-first century.

Reading the novels in order lets you watch their partnership deepen as they move from uneasy colleagues to trusted, if argumentative, allies. If you like investigative thrillers with military detail, global politics, and a two-hander lead dynamic, this is the series background to start with.