Tom Atkins Books in Order

Tom Atkins is a smaller corner of Salkeld's fiction, currently centred on a single novel, Trouble in the Wind, but it opens up a very different side of his writing. Instead of rural policing or Cumbrian CID work, this book moves into contemporary espionage, cyber-security, and the uneasy overlap between old tradecraft and new technology.

Tom Atkins is a veteran intelligence officer who joined the Service in the closing years of the Cold War. When the story begins, he seems close to the end of that life. Then he is handed a job that is anything but routine, to investigate a commercial cyber-security outfit that may have penetrated the Service itself, all while still helping to oversee an active surveillance operation involving a suspected terrorist cell. It is a setup built on mistrust from the first page.

The generational clash is the point.

Atkins is paired with Rishan Kotak, a much younger recruit whose expertise lies in the dark net, hacking, and electronic surveillance. The contrast between them gives the book much of its energy. Atkins brings experience, caution, and fieldcraft. Kotak brings technical fluency and a newer way of reading risk. The novel gets a lot of mileage out of asking whether those two skill sets can work together before events force them into outright survival mode.

What follows is not a glossy, globe-trotting spy fantasy. It is closer to a pressured institutional thriller, full of uncertainty about who can be trusted, what has already been compromised, and how exposed the protagonists really are. When one operation is blown, the stakes rise fast and Atkins and Kotak find themselves cut off from the easy support they would normally expect. That sense of being outmatched gives the book its momentum.

Readers coming from the Lakeland books will still recognise Salkeld's interests. He is good at showing how organisations fail under pressure, how professionals improvise when procedure no longer protects them, and how character is revealed by stress rather than speeches. The tone is taut and suspicious, but still readable and grounded.

Even as a one-book series, Tom Atkins feels connected to the rest of Salkeld's world. The character later turns up in The Wolf at the Gate, which gives this strand a nice link back into the Cumbrian novels. If you want to see what Salkeld does when he swaps hill farms and CID rooms for espionage and cyber-intrigue, this is the book to try.