The Englishman Books in Order

The Englishman series is David Gilman's line of contemporary spy thrillers centred on Dan Raglan, a former soldier from the French Foreign Legion known simply as the Englishman. Raglan is less a company man than a modern knight errant, called in when official channels break down.

Raglan tends to appear when official channels have already failed.

His past in the Legion, fighting covert wars on the edge of the Sahara, gives him both unusual skills and a far flung network of comrades. Gilman draws on that background to send Raglan into operations that brush up against intelligence services but are not fully controlled by them.

In The Englishman, a British banker with access to sensitive information about counter terror operations is abducted in London. Raglan follows the trail through Africa and Europe to a remote Russian penal colony nicknamed White Eagle, a frozen prison for the country's most violent criminals. The mission is as much about getting in as getting out, and along the way Raglan uncovers just how far some agencies will go to protect their secrets.

Betrayal raises the stakes by pulling on Raglan's deepest loyalties. An old Foreign Legion comrade, now working inside the Pentagon, vanishes after warning that he is in danger. Raglan's search takes him from the backstreets of Marseille to Florida, Washington, D.C. and the Honduran rainforest, where he finds himself caught between the CIA, a rogue FBI agent and a shadowy group willing to start a war to get what it wants.

In Resurrection, the discovery of a Second World War era fighter plane emerging from the sands on the border between Sudan and Chad sets off a new hunt. Inside the wreck is a skeleton still chained to a briefcase containing a document that could expose the most valuable spy British intelligence has ever run. The British, the French and the Russians all want control of that secret, and Raglan races from the desert through Europe to Moscow to decide who, if anyone, should hold it.

The action in these novels is fast and often brutal, from prison breaks and ambushes to close quarters fights and high speed chases. Yet Raglan is not just a weapon. Gilman gives him a strong moral core, a reluctance to leave friends behind and an awareness that the clean story an agency wants to tell rarely matches what happens on the ground.

Each book can be read as a standalone mission, but taken together they chart the making of a man who lives in the blurred space between the official world of intelligence and the unofficial world of people like him. Readers who enjoy believable tradecraft, vivid locations and a driven hero with a stubborn sense of honour will find plenty to follow through the series.