Years of Longdirk Books in Order

The Years of Longdirk is Duncan writing alternate history with a demonic grin. The series imagines a Europe reshaped by conquest and fear, then drops a stubborn Scottish outlaw into the middle of it. Toby Strangerson, better known as Longdirk, is not polished nobility. He is rough, angry, resilient, and exactly the kind of man who keeps surviving when more respectable people expect him to die.

The books start in Scotland and spread outward through a wider Europe full of war, unstable rulers, and supernatural corruption. One of the driving ideas is that political disaster and literal evil are tangled together. Kingship is not just broken. It may be demon-ridden. That gives the trilogy a darker feel than some of Duncan's lighter swashbucklers, even when his sense of pace and irony is still very much present.

Longdirk keeps moving.

That motion is part of the appeal. The series travels through countries, armies, and power struggles, showing how one hunted man becomes part of a much bigger fight. Toby is forced to wrestle not only with enemies and politics, but with the possibility that the darkness he is fighting may also be close to him in more personal ways.

These books were first published under the name Ken Hood, and they feel a little different from Duncan's better-known fantasy series. There is more mud, more history, and more demonic menace. But the familiar pleasures are still there: competent storytelling, pressure on the characters, and a hero who has to keep improvising because the world refuses to turn simple.

If you want Duncan with more alternate-history grit, this is the one.