Espionage Thriller Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Honeytrap | 2025 | Buy |
| The Dissonant | 2025 | Buy |
| The Swallow | 2026 | Buy |
Lance Spector Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Asset | 2020 | Buy |
| The Russian | 2020 | Buy |
| The Target | 2021 | Buy |
| The Sleeper | 2021 | Buy |
| The Splinter | 2022 | Buy |
| The Fixer | 2023 | Buy |
| The Contractor | - | N/A |
| The Contact / The Contractor | 2023 | Buy |
| The Center | 2024 | Buy |
| The Station | 2024 | Buy |
Saul Herzog is a pen name maintained with deliberate anonymity — the author has described it as a passion project built on years of research into intelligence agencies, geopolitics, and Cold War history. The identity behind the name has remained undisclosed, which reviewers have noted adds a fitting layer to a series about people whose names are never supposed to appear in any file.
The Lance Spector series launched in 2020 with The Asset and ran to ten books through 2024. Lance is a former CIA operative who keeps trying to leave the agency and keeps being pulled back by threats too personal or too catastrophic to ignore. The series is set against Russian aggression, biological weapons programmes, and NATO crises, and Herzog draws on detailed geopolitical knowledge to keep the scenarios plausible rather than cartoonish. Reviewers consistently note the fast pacing, multiple double-crosses, and a supporting cast — particularly Tatyana Aleksandrova — that gives the series more emotional depth than the typical action thriller.
His Espionage Thriller series, beginning with The Honeytrap (2025), shifts perspective to three women operatives whose separate missions converge on a single conspiracy. Where the Lance Spector books lean toward individual heroism, this newer series draws more on the moral ambiguities of tradecraft — closer in spirit to John le Carre than to Vince Flynn.