Will Adams Books in Order

If you want archaeological treasure hunts: The Alexander Cipher → The Exodus Quest / The Moses Quest → The Lost Labyrinth → The Eden Legacy
If you want Italian historical conspiracies: The Sacred Spoils → The Heretic Scroll
If you prefer English mystery-adventure: The Assassin King → The Beowulf Murders → The Hallowed Grail → The Rebel Queen
If you want standalones first: Newton's Fire → City of the Lost

Will Adams took a roundabout path to fiction, and that feels right when you read his books. His thrillers are full of people who learn by doing, improvise under pressure, and keep moving even when the map has fallen apart. He writes adventure-driven mysteries with a strong historical backbone, usually built around lost texts, ancient sites, and the kind of question that can pull a modern life badly off course.

Before novels took over, he did a bit of everything.

Public biographical notes about Adams tend to start with the jobs. He worked as a shop salesman, painter and decorator, warehouse porter, and microfiche technician before landing at a Washington, DC based firm of business history consultants. There he wrote corporate histories and biographies, work that seems to have given him two useful habits: digging into background material and shaping a lot of research into a story people will actually want to finish. He also travelled between projects, looking for the kinds of places that might later become settings.

That long apprenticeship matters. Adams did not arrive as a novelist by way of a tidy publishing path. He later worked for a London communications agency, then left to chase what he had long wanted to do, write fiction full-time. His debut, The Alexander Cipher, came out in 2007 and introduced Daniel Knox, an archaeologist who keeps finding himself in the blast radius of very old secrets and very current danger.

The Daniel Knox books made Adams's name with readers who like fast plots but also want the history to mean something. The Exodus Quest / The Moses Quest, The Lost Labyrinth, and The Eden Legacy all build from real places, old arguments, and buried evidence, then push those ideas into high-stakes chases. The appeal is not just the puzzle. It is the way Adams keeps the scholarship moving, so the novels feel curious and restless instead of heavy.

What readers often respond to is his refusal to treat the past as a museum piece. In Adams's novels, old inscriptions, broken mosaics, and half-forgotten stories are live wires. They connect directly to greed, faith, politics, and survival.

He likes buried history, awkward heroes, and very bad odds.

He has also ranged outside Daniel Knox. Newton's Fire turns to Isaac Newton, coded papers, and apocalyptic conspiracy. City of the Lost moves into modern geopolitical suspense while still drawing energy from the deep past. Later books such as The Sacred Spoils and The Heretic Scroll pair historian Carmen Nero with former conman Cesco Rossi, while The Assassin King, The Beowulf Murders, The Hallowed Grail, and The Rebel Queen follow Anna Warne and Ben Elias through English mysteries tied to crown jewels, Anglo-Saxon legend, Arthurian echoes, and Boudica's world. Across all of them, the pattern is clear. Adams likes the point where research, danger, and obsession meet.

That consistency may come from the life he had before publication. Writing corporate histories and biographies is not the same as writing fiction, but it does teach patience, structure, and respect for detail. Adams's books rarely feel as if the historical material was sprinkled on at the last minute. Even when the pace is quick, the old world underneath the story has weight.

His novels have been published in more than twenty languages.

These days Adams writes full-time and lives in Suffolk. There is not a huge amount of public detail about his private life, but the work gives a pretty clear sense of what keeps drawing him back: lost knowledge, dangerous landscapes, and ordinary people who discover that history is not finished with them yet.