Tom Wilkes Books in Order

The Tom Wilkes books are David Rollins's first thrillers, and you can see a lot of his later interests taking shape in them straight away. There is military planning, intelligence work, political tension between countries, and ordinary people caught in the path of very large events. The series is short, just Rogue Element and Sword Of Allah, but it covers a lot of ground. If the Vin Cooper books feel like wide American-led conspiracies, the Tom Wilkes stories feel more rooted in Australia's region and security worries.

Tom Wilkes is a sergeant in the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, and he is written less as a lone maverick than as a professional soldier inside a team. He is capable, practical, and used to working with limited time and bad information. That gives the books a solid operational feel. Wilkes is not there to brood for pages. He is there to get people out, stop the situation getting worse, and do the job before the politicians lose control of it.

In Rogue Element, the spark is terrifyingly simple: a passenger jet disappears in Indonesian airspace, survivors are stranded in jungle, and the Indonesian government's evasions make everything worse. What follows is part rescue story, part espionage thriller, and part near-war scenario. Wilkes and his SAS unit are sent into the chaos to find the survivors and uncover what really happened. The setting matters a lot here. Rollins uses the physical danger of the jungle and the political tension between Australia and Indonesia to keep the pressure high.

These books move fast.

Sword Of Allah opens the map right out. Clues and threats run through Papua New Guinea, the Persian Gulf, Manila, the West Bank, and Canberra, until Wilkes is facing a plot that links extremists, intelligence agencies, and Australia's own backyard. He has to work with American allies, including the CIA, but the series never loses its Australian point of view. That is part of the appeal. The stakes are global, yet the books keep returning to what those crises mean for Australian soldiers, Australian planners, and a country that cannot pretend distance will keep it safe.

The danger is rarely just one gunman or one bomb.

What to expect, then, is a muscular military thriller with a strong fieldwork feel. Rollins likes the detail of troop movements, surveillance, special-forces tactics, and the way a single bad decision at the top can put people on the ground in impossible positions. There is action, but there is also a steady awareness that these missions sit inside bigger political games. Read the two books in order, starting with Rogue Element. Together they work as the opening act of Rollins's career and a solid introduction to the kind of pressure-cooker stories he does well.