Soft Target Books in Order

The Soft Target books are Conrad Jones at his most direct and explosive. This is a counter-terror thriller series built around John Tankersley, better known as Tank, and the hard men and women around him who are sent after threats most people never even hear about until it is too late. The stories are broad in scope, moving between Britain, the United States, and other pressure points where extremists, damaged veterans, and criminal opportunists collide.

Tank is the engine of the series. He is not a gentle hero and these are not polished drawing-room thrillers. He leads from the front, takes ugly work personally, and tends to solve problems at speed. That gives the books their tone. They are fast, blunt, and often brutal, with a lot of urgency and very little comfort.

The early books lean into major terror plots and the fear of spectacular attacks on everyday targets. Soft Target throws readers into bombings at tourist locations and the hunt for the people behind them. Tank keeps the pressure on. Jeruasalem raises the scale again with dirty bomb threats. Later books such as The 18th Brigade, Blister, and Unleashed keep the series tied to the fallout from war, extremism, and chemical or mass-casualty threats. The details change, but the underlying question stays the same: how do you stop people who believe large-scale civilian deaths are justified?

These books also have a clear Liverpool connection. Even when the action moves outward, there is a sense that Jones is writing from a base he knows well. That gives the series a grounded feel beneath all the global stakes. The plots may be big, but the anger behind them often starts in something personal, grief, humiliation, revenge, or the long aftershocks of violence.

Expect short chapters, high body counts, and a lot of forward momentum. Expect villains who are not abstract masterminds so much as dangerous believers, damaged operators, or men who have decided that ordinary moral rules no longer apply. The series is interested in ideology, but it is even more interested in what violence does once it gets loose in the real world.

Tank does not do subtle diplomacy.

If you come to Soft Target looking for hard-edged action thrillers with a British feel, a recurring anti-terror team, and plots that escalate quickly, this is where to start with Conrad Jones. The books are rougher and more muscular than his later police procedurals, but you can see a lot of his long-term interests taking shape here: trauma, revenge, radicalisation, and the cost of trying to stop the worst people before they strike.