Thomas Goodfellowe Books in Order

The Thomas Goodfellowe books follow a very different kind of Westminster player. Tom Goodfellowe is a shabby backbench MP with a wrecked love life, an overdraft and a knack for standing up for the wrong people at exactly the wrong time.

In Goodfellowe MP he lives above a restaurant in London’s Chinatown and tries to keep his head down. When he agrees to help a frightened young Chinese woman, he stumbles into a confrontation with the Prime Minister, the police and a vengeful media owner who is happy to destroy one obscure MP to make a point.

In The Buddha of Brewer Street, Goodfellowe has inched closer to government but is still on shaky ground. A terrorist attack on the Dalai Lama plunges him into the fierce politics around the search for the new incarnation, pulling him from Westminster committee rooms to the fringes of Tibet and back to the streets he calls home.

The stakes are spiritual, diplomatic and deeply personal all at once.

Whispers of Betrayal raises the tension again when a group of disillusioned soldiers decides the government has betrayed them and sets out to hold London hostage. As the capital’s lifelines are cut, Goodfellowe finds himself torn between ambition, loyalty and the need to stop a friend from taking the country over the brink.

Where the House of Cards trilogy is driven by a single ruthless mastermind, the Goodfellowe novels are warmer and more chaotic. Dobbs still relishes political intrigue, but he lets his hero be vulnerable, conflicted and occasionally foolish, which makes his small acts of courage feel earned.

The series blends constituency case work, family entanglements and big set piece crises into one story about what an honest politician might still manage to do inside a battered system. If you like the sound of ordinary decency colliding with extraordinary events, this is the Dobbs sequence to try.