Simon Conway Books in Order

If you want the later MI6 trilogy: The Stranger → The Saboteur → The Survivor
If you want the earlier Jonah Said books: Rage → A Loyal Spy
If you want a standalone spy thriller: The Agent Runner
If you want murder mixed with political conspiracy: Rock Creek Park
If you want the raw early standalone: Damaged

Simon Conway was born in California in 1967, but most of the life that shaped him as a writer happened in Britain. He was educated there, studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh, and then took a path that moved a long way from lecture rooms and toward places where politics and violence stop being abstract.

He didn't come to thrillers from the sidelines.

Conway served as a British Army officer in a Highland regiment. After leaving the army, he worked in mine clearance and humanitarian demining, clearing landmines and unexploded bombs in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Later, as co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition, he helped campaign for the international treaty that banned cluster bombs. It is the kind of background that gives his fiction its hard, practical texture.

That experience shows up less as swagger than as detail.

His debut novel, Damaged, appeared in 1998 and was a very dark opening statement, part crime story, part thriller, full of pressure, bad decisions, and people already in over their heads. He followed it with Rage, which introduced Jonah Said, a bruised, difficult protagonist dropped into the chaos around Iraq. Then A Loyal Spy took that world further and won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger in 2010.

Readers who like Conway usually talk about the same things. The books move quickly, but they also care about how intelligence work, military missions, and political decisions actually feel on the ground. His spies and soldiers are rarely clean heroes. They're tired, compromised, funny in a dark way, and often caught between loyalty to a person and loyalty to an institution.

The standalone The Agent Runner is a good example of that balance. It follows an MI6 handler whose career collapses after a source inside Pakistan's ISI is exposed, and it mixes tradecraft, betrayal, and private fallout without turning sentimental. Rock Creek Park takes a different route, blending murder investigation, Washington power, and military science, but it has the same interest in systems that chew people up.

His later Jude Lyon novels, The Stranger, The Saboteur, and The Survivor, bring Conway's writing into an even more contemporary MI6 setting. These books are bigger in scale and more overtly tied to modern terrorism, state secrecy, and geopolitical blowback, but they keep the same grounded feel. The action is sharp, yet the real engine is often the moral mess behind official decisions.

Conway has said that his books tend to start as fragments, some drawn from places he has seen himself, others from news reports or stories picked up in hazardous corners of the world. A visit to Kobane in 2015, while working for the HALO Trust, helped feed into The Stranger. That mix of firsthand texture and thriller plotting is a big part of why his novels feel so immediate.

He has kept one foot in the real world while writing fiction. He has continued to work with the HALO Trust on access and new projects in conflict-affected places. He lives in Glasgow with his wife, the journalist and broadcaster Sarah Smith, and they have two daughters.