Slade Books in Order

Slade isn’t a conventional series hero. He’s a shadowy Russian double agent, embedded inside British intelligence, whose presence hangs over both Running Blind and The Freedom Trap even when the story is told through other people’s eyes.

In Running Blind, the point of view belongs to Alan Stewart, a former British agent trying to live quietly in Scotland with his Icelandic girlfriend. Slade, his old controller, turns up with what sounds like a simple favour: fly to Iceland and deliver a small parcel along a route Stewart already knows well.

Once Stewart lands, the job unravels almost at once—a dead contact on an empty road, surveillance he can’t quite shake, and the nagging sense that he’s been set up. The chase that follows drives him across Iceland’s empty interior of lava fields, glaciers, river crossings and tiny settlements, with hostile agents from more than one service on his heels and limited help from his own side.

The result feels like a spy novel welded onto a survival story. Bagley leans into the odd practicalities of Cold War espionage in a place with very few roads, sparse radio contact and a landscape that can kill you faster than any assassin.

The second book, The Freedom Trap, picks up Slade’s story from a different angle. Here we follow Joseph Rearden, a South African crook hired to steal a packet of diamonds in London. After a very public arrest and a long sentence, Rearden attracts the attention of the Scarperers, a covert organisation that specialises in breaking prisoners out of jail—for a steep fee.

Rearden’s escape is arranged alongside that of Slade, now serving time for espionage, and the two men are spirited to an isolated safe house in Ireland. From there the plot widens into a hunt through rural hideouts and on to Malta, as British intelligence tries to smash the Scarperers and keep Slade from being handed to another power that values his secrets.

Across the two novels Bagley keeps circling the same questions: how far can you trust the people who claim to be on your side, and what happens when a single embedded traitor tilts the whole game? Expect brisk action, vividly drawn locations and the unnerving sense that Slade is always a step ahead, even when you barely see him on the page.