Espionage Thriller books in order

Saul Herzog's Espionage Thriller series follows three women operatives — Irina, Margot, and Oksana — whose separate missions on behalf of competing intelligence services slowly converge on a single conspiracy that could ignite a world war. Darker and more morally complicated than the Lance Spector books, the series opens with The Honeytrap (2025).

Reading order

# Title Published Author Buy on Amazon
1 The Honeytrap 2025 Saul Herzog Buy
2 The Dissonant 2025 Saul Herzog Buy
3 The Swallow 2026 Saul Herzog Buy

The Espionage Thriller series opens with The Honeytrap (2025) and introduces three protagonists: Irina, trained as a seducer and manipulator by a Soviet-era intelligence programme; Margot, a Western operative whose career has taken her to the edges of what she is willing to do; and Oksana, an orphan of the Cold War whose loyalties are genuinely uncertain. Their separate operations run on parallel tracks before converging on a shared threat.

Herzog has described the series as a departure from the Lance Spector template — less concerned with who wins and more concerned with what the work costs the people doing it. The Dissonant and The Swallow (both 2025) continue the story as the three women’s missions draw closer together. A fourth entry, The Hypersonic, is planned for 2027.

The series is published independently, as with the Lance Spector books, and continues Herzog’s practice of research-heavy plotting in a contemporary geopolitical setting.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many books are in the Espionage Thriller series?

There are three books in the Espionage Thriller series, published between 2025 and 2026.

What is the first book in the Espionage Thriller series?

The first book in the Espionage Thriller series is The Honeytrap, published in 2025.

How does the Espionage Thriller series differ from Lance Spector?

The Lance Spector books are driven by a single heroic operative taking on enormous threats, with fast action and straightforward moral stakes. The Espionage Thriller series is more fragmented and morally ambiguous: three female protagonists with different allegiances, different histories, and different methods, all working in the same grey zone where tradecraft makes everything murky. The series draws more on the psychological tradition of spy fiction — seduction, betrayal, the question of who is really running whom — than on the action-thriller template of the Spector books.

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