Tom Bradby Books in Order
Find all Tom Bradby books in order here, with short summaries, background on the Kate Henderson spy series, and guidance on where to start reading.
Last updated: December 22, 2025
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Publication Order
10 books
Yesterday's Spy
by Tom Bradby
2022
In 1953 London, retired British intelligence officer Harry Tower is barely coping with grief when a midnight call says his estranged journalist son has vanished in Tehran. Travelling into a city on the brink of a coup, Harry must navigate spies, oil politics and old enemies to find him and confront the damage between them.
Triple Cross
by Tom Bradby
2021
Now retired from MI6 and rebuilding her life in the South of France, Kate Henderson is confronted by the prime minister with a new story: the entire case against him may be a Russian misinformation trap. Pulled back into an investigation centred on the mysterious Agent Dante, Kate must decide who, if anyone, she can still trust.
Double Agent
by Tom Bradby
2020
On holiday in Venice, Kate Henderson is abducted by a Russian defector who offers explosive evidence that the British prime minister is a long-term asset. To test whether the tape is real, she reopens a toxic investigation, risking her career, her family and what little peace of mind she has left.
Secret Service
by Tom Bradby
2019
MI6 officer Kate Henderson seems like an ordinary working mother, but her latest operation reveals that the British prime minister is seriously ill and his likely successor may be compromised by Moscow. Racing against a looming leadership contest, she must hunt a hidden Russian agent while her family and reputation start to fracture under the strain.
Blood Money
by Tom Bradby
2008
New York, 1929: young detective Joe Quinn catches a case that should make his name when a banker falls from a Wall Street skyscraper. As more of the man's old friends die, Quinn uncovers a web of greed and revenge that shows how dangerous honesty can be in a crooked city.
The God of Chaos
by Tom Bradby
2005
In Cairo in 1942, as Rommel's forces press in from the desert, disgraced former New York cop Joe Quinn is asked to investigate a senior British officer found brutally murdered. The case drags him through the city's underbelly toward a possible spy in high command and the one witness he is dangerously drawn to protect.
The White Russian
by Tom Bradby
2002
In the winter of 1917, St Petersburg police investigator Sandro Ruzsky returns from exile to find a young couple stabbed to death on the frozen Neva. His search for their killer draws him into revolutionary plots, royal secrets and an old love who may not be on his side.
The Master of Rain
by Tom Bradby
2002
Shanghai, 1926: idealistic newcomer Richard Field joins the international police and is thrown into the brutal murder of a Russian woman in the foreign quarter. Following a trail of coded ledgers and whispered deals, he collides with powerful gangsters, corrupt officials and a survivor whose help he may not be able to trust.
The Sleep of the Dead
by Tom Bradby
2001
Fifteen years after stumbling on the murdered body of a neighbour and losing her soldier father in the Falklands, military intelligence officer Julia Havilland is sent home under investigation. As fresh deaths stir old memories, she must untangle what really happened before the past destroys what is left of her career and sanity.
Shadow Dancer
by Tom Bradby
1998
IRA bomber and young mother Colette McVeigh is caught after a failed attack in London and given a brutal choice: inform on her own family or never see her children again. As MI5 handler David Ryan follows her back to Belfast, both are pulled into a knot of divided loyalties and betrayal.
Where should I start?
If you want modern MI6 intrigue: Secret Service → Double Agent → Triple Cross
If you like tense stories about the Troubles and trauma: Shadow Dancer → The Sleep of the Dead
If you enjoy richly drawn historical crime: The Master of Rain → The White Russian → The God of Chaos → Blood Money
If you prefer a recent historical spy standalone: Yesterday's Spy
Author bio
Tom Bradby is a British journalist and novelist whose working life has swung between the newsroom and the world of spies and crime on the page. He was born in 1967 on the island of Malta, where his father was serving in the Royal Navy. The family later moved first to Northern Ireland and then to Berkshire in England.
As a boy he went to Westbourne House and Sherborne School, before reading history at the University of Edinburgh. The degree suited his curiosity about politics, conflict and how power works. That mix of subjects would become the backbone of both his reporting and his fiction.
Bradby joined ITN in 1990 as an editorial trainee and learned the trade behind the camera before he ever sat in front of one. In the 1990s he became Ireland correspondent, covering the peace process and the fragile attempts to end the Troubles. Later, as Asia correspondent based in Hong Kong, he reported on unrest in Indonesia and was seriously injured while covering riots in Jakarta.
Those years in conflict zones left him with a close-up sense of fear, loyalty and divided communities. They also gave him the raw material for his first novel, Shadow Dancer, a tense story about an IRA bomber forced to inform for MI5.
Back in Britain he moved through a series of high-profile roles at ITV News, serving as royal correspondent, UK editor and then political editor. In 2015 he took over as anchor of News at Ten and has since become one of the most familiar faces in British nightly news. Along the way he has also presented a political discussion show and major royal broadcasts, drawing on decades spent inside Westminster and the royal beat.
On the fiction side, Bradby has written a run of historical and crime novels that roam far from the studio. The Master of Rain and The White Russian follow embattled detectives in 1920s Shanghai and revolutionary St Petersburg, while The God of Chaos and Blood Money explore wartime Cairo and Wall Street on the eve of the crash. These books are known for dense atmosphere, tight plotting and a clear sense of how ordinary people get squeezed by empires and markets, and several have been recognised by major crime-writing awards.
More recently he has turned to contemporary espionage with the Kate Henderson thrillers Secret Service, Double Agent and Triple Cross. In them, a senior MI6 officer hunts for Russian influence at the top of British politics while trying to hold together an already strained family life. Readers tend to come for the high-stakes plots and stay for the way he shows the cost of betrayal, secrecy and long-term anxiety.
His standalone novel Yesterday's Spy shifts back to the 1950s, following a retired intelligence officer searching for his missing son in Tehran at the time of a coup. It pulls together many of Bradby's favourite threads: contested history, clashing governments and damaged parents trying to make amends. Across all his books, questions of loyalty, identity and the price of ambition keep resurfacing.
In 1994 he married Claudia, a jewellery designer and the daughter of a senior Royal Navy officer, and the couple have three children. They live in Hampshire, where his writing life runs alongside his work on screen. Bradby has spoken openly about stepping back from the job after a period of severe insomnia and anxiety, and that experience now feeds into the emotional landscapes of his characters as much as his years as a foreign correspondent once did.
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