Brett Battles Books in Order (Updated September 9, 2026)

Brett Battles writes espionage, action thrillers, apocalyptic fiction, alternate-history science fiction, mysteries, and collaborative continuation novels. His longest original series follows Jonathan Quinn, a professional cleaner whose job is to remove bodies and evidence after covert operations. Other major series include Project Eden, Rewinder, the Excoms, the Night Man Chronicles, Logan Harper, and Alexandra Poe.

Because Battles has several completely separate continuities, there is no reason to combine all of his books by publication year. Read Jonathan Quinn from The Cleaner onward, Project Eden from Sick, Rewinder from Rewinder, and the other series independently.

The fastest way to choose a Brett Battles series

1. Start with The Cleaner for international espionage and Jonathan Quinn, Battles’s signature character.
2. Start with Sick for Project Eden, a seven-book apocalyptic thriller that must be read in order.
3. Start with Rewinder for alternate-history science fiction and time travel.
4. Start with The Excoms for a team of discarded covert operatives brought back together for difficult missions.
5. Start with Night Man for Nate and Jar in Battles’s mystery-focused Night Man Chronicles.
6. Choose No Return, Mine, or The Pull of Gravity if you want a standalone rather than a series.

Jonathan Quinn novels with a line about every mission

Jonathan Quinn is a cleaner rather than a conventional assassin. His specialty is making bodies, evidence, and traces of covert operations disappear. Orlando and Nate become increasingly important as his closest partners, turning what begins as an espionage profession into a long-running found-family story.

1. The Cleaner: Quinn investigates a suspicious arson scene and discovers a body that should not be there, leading him to a conspiracy that may be trying to eliminate the organization employing him.
2. The Deceived: Quinn is hired to erase evidence connected with the death of his friend Steven Markoff, then discovers that Markoff’s girlfriend has disappeared and the case reaches from Washington to Singapore.
3. Shadow of Betrayal: Quinn is sent to observe a meeting in an abandoned Irish church, but an assassin turns the assignment into a cleanup job that leaves behind one clue to a much larger mystery.
4. The Silenced: Quinn is hired to remove remains hidden for twenty-five years inside a London building, but rival groups also want the body and force his team to discover why the dead man still matters.
5. The Destroyed: A woman named Mila Voss, officially dead for six years, appears on a hotel camera, forcing Quinn to confront questions about an old assignment and why the people who ordered her death want answers now.
6. The Collected: Nate has been working as a full cleaner while Quinn’s career remains uncertain, but a routine job becomes a trap and Quinn and Orlando must find him before the people who captured him finish their plan.
7. The Enraged: After the disastrous rescue on Duran Island hurts people Quinn cares about, he turns the next mission into a hunt for the person responsible and makes revenge the central objective.
8. The Discarded: Orlando’s mentor Abraham asks Quinn for help finding the mysterious package from his final assignment seven years earlier, and the team learns that the package is something people will kill to control.
9. The Buried: Quinn and Nate discover that the body they were supposed to remove is only the beginning of a new assignment involving a living asset whose secret is wanted by several dangerous groups.
10. The Unleashed: Quinn and Orlando try to take a family vacation at a private island villa, but old revenge reaches them even there and turns the supposedly peaceful getaway into another fight for survival.
11. The Aggrieved: Someone close to Quinn and Nate is killed, and the team abandons ordinary professional detachment to pursue the people responsible no matter how far the search takes them.
12. The Fractured: Quinn’s damaged relationship with Nate becomes central when a mission capable of causing mass casualties requires help from the one operative who wants nothing to do with him.
13. The Damaged: The story looks back fifteen years to Quinn’s younger days under mentor Durrie, when an assignment intended to rehabilitate the veteran cleaner instead threatened Quinn, Orlando, and their future.
14. The Unknown: A scientist disappears from a train crossing the Austrian mountains, and Quinn’s team must recover him before hostile forces can extract knowledge capable of changing the world.
15. The Vanished: Quinn crosses paths again with Mariko Hirahara, whose life was permanently changed by a job nine years earlier, and he risks his career to help her while searching for a missing physicist.
16. The Taken: Dmitri Melnikov, whom Quinn believed dead after an earlier bombing, is abducted along with other targets, and Quinn accepts an unofficial rescue mission because the case is too personal to refuse.

Read the sixteen main novels in this order. The jobs are often self-contained, but Quinn, Orlando, Nate, Durrie, Abraham, and recurring adversaries create substantial continuity across the series.

Becoming Quinn is Book 0, not the best first book

• Becoming Quinn: This prequel explains how Quinn entered the covert world and became a professional cleaner before the events of The Cleaner.

The author numbers it as a prequel rather than Book 1. Chronological readers can place it first, but publication-order readers should begin with The Cleaner and return to Becoming Quinn once Quinn’s established reputation already means something.

Jonathan Quinn short stories and Orlando stories

1. Just Another Job: A shorter Jonathan Quinn assignment gives readers a compact example of his cleanup work outside the full novels.
2. Off the Clock: Quinn faces trouble outside the normal structure of a paid cleaning assignment, showing how difficult it is for someone in his profession to separate work from life.
3. Lesson Plan: Another short Quinn story expands his professional history without functioning as a numbered novel.
4. The Assignment: Orlando receives the spotlight in a story that gives more background and independence to one of Quinn’s most important partners.
5. Quick Study: Orlando again takes a central role, giving readers another look at her abilities away from Quinn’s point of view.

These ebook stories are optional. Read several full novels first so the characters and their professional world are already familiar.

Project Eden books must be read straight through

Project Eden is a seven-book apocalyptic thriller about a secret organization attempting to radically reduce the human population and control what remains. Unlike the episodic Quinn missions, this is one escalating story.

1. Sick: Daniel Ash wakes to find his family infected by a horrifying disease while armed men in biohazard suits invade his home, beginning his attempt to uncover the organization behind a plan that threatens humanity.
2. Exit 9: The survivors and resistance forces learn more about Project Eden’s infrastructure and race to prevent the organization from moving closer to the population-reduction event it has spent years preparing.
3. Pale Horse: Project Eden’s plan advances and the resistance struggles to stop a biological catastrophe before the conspiracy can push civilization past the point of recovery.
4. Ashes: The survivors face the consequences of the pandemic while Project Eden continues positioning itself to dominate the devastated world left behind.
5. Eden Rising: The Sage Flu spreads across the planet, and a fraudulent message promising a vaccine becomes part of Project Eden’s attempt to control frightened survivors while the Resistance prepares a new strategy.
6. Dream Sky: The struggle between the Resistance and Project Eden enters its next stage as surviving communities fight to remain free in a world transformed by the pandemic.
7. Down: The seven-book conflict reaches its conclusion as the survivors attempt to stop Project Eden permanently and determine what kind of human society can exist after the catastrophe.

Do not skip books in Project Eden. Battles specifically treats the sequence as one that should be read in order, with each volume continuing the pandemic and resistance story from the previous installment.

Rewinder trilogy in order

The Rewinder novels move away from espionage into alternate history and time travel. Denny Younger works in a world where trained rewinders can travel into the past to verify family histories, but one mistake can change everything.

1. Rewinder: Denny Younger works as a verifier of historical family records until a mistake in the past alters history itself and leaves him responsible for a world radically different from the one he knew.
2. Destroyer: Denny may be the last rewinder with a working time-travel device, but when the device is stolen and his girlfriend is kidnapped he must cross continents and eras to prevent another manipulation of history.
3. Survivor: The final volume brings Denny’s struggle with altered timelines and those attempting to control history toward its conclusion.

Read all three consecutively. The central premise depends on the historical changes created in the previous books, so starting with Destroyer or Survivor would reveal consequences before their causes.

The Excoms novels in order

The Excoms brings together covert operatives who have been discarded, disavowed, or pushed out of the shadow world. Their collective experience makes them useful precisely because official organizations can deny knowing they exist.

1. The Excoms: A group of highly skilled former operatives is assembled into a new team for a mission no conventional agency wants to handle openly.
2. Town at the Edge of Darkness: The team investigates a remote and dangerous situation where isolation makes it difficult to determine who controls the town and what is really being hidden there.
3. City of Nope: The Excoms enter another mission involving a place and adversaries that do not behave according to the assumptions the team brings with them.
4. Blinded by the Night: The fourth book returns the discarded operatives to another covert threat that tests the trust and specialized abilities holding the team together.

Publication order is the sensible route because the team itself is the continuing element even when the locations and missions change.

Night Man Chronicles featuring Nate and Jar

The Night Man Chronicles is a mystery and crime series centered on Nate and Jar. It has a different tone from Jonathan Quinn despite Battles’s familiarity with covert operatives and people working outside normal law-enforcement structures.

1. Night Man: Nate and Jar begin a new investigative partnership when an apparently ordinary problem reveals a more dangerous mystery requiring skills outside standard police procedure.
2. Insidious: The pair return for a case where the threat develops quietly and proves more deeply rooted than the first clues suggest.
3. Mercy: Nate and Jar take on another high-stakes mystery that pushes the series further into crime, danger, and the consequences of helping people who have nowhere else to turn.

Read Night Man, Insidious, and Mercy in publication order.

Logan Harper thrillers in order

1. Little Girl Gone: Logan Harper is drawn into a missing-child investigation that turns his relatively ordinary life into a search involving secrets, danger, and people determined to stop him.
2. Every Precious Thing: Logan returns for another investigation in which protecting vulnerable people and discovering why someone is being hunted become more important than staying out of trouble.

The two books form a straightforward sequence. Begin with Little Girl Gone to meet Logan before his second case.

Alexandra Poe novels in order

Battles co-created the Alexandra Poe books with Robert Gregory Browne. Poe is a former FBI agent whose investigations take her into international operations and threats beyond ordinary domestic crime.

1. Poe: Alexandra Poe enters a dangerous international investigation while pursuing answers connected with her own past and the intelligence world around her.
2. Takedown: Poe returns for a second operation that builds on her experience and places her against another high-level threat.

Read Poe first because it establishes Alexandra before the continuation in Takedown.

Brett Battles standalone thrillers

1. The Pull of Gravity: An independent suspense story built around personal relationships, past choices, and the forces that pull people back toward situations they believed they had escaped.
2. No Return: A man returns to his hometown and becomes involved in a mystery whose roots lie in local secrets and a past that has not remained safely buried.
3. Mine: Battles delivers a separate thriller focused on possession, obsession, and a conflict that becomes increasingly dangerous as the characters discover how far someone will go to claim what they believe belongs to them.

These books can be read in any order because they do not share Jonathan Quinn, Project Eden, or another recurring cast.

Brett Battles and Stuart Woods

Battles later became a continuation collaborator in Stuart Woods’s fictional universe. These novels belong deep inside existing series and should not be mistaken for new Brett Battles series starting at Book 1.

Teddy Fay books written with the Stuart Woods estate

1. Obsession: Teddy Fay returns for a later adventure in the long-running series, using his intelligence background and talent for disguise against a new threat.
2. Golden Hour: Teddy’s continuation moves into another case involving powerful people, hidden motives, and the skills that once made him a dangerous CIA operative.
3. Blown Away: Battles continues Teddy Fay’s later adventures with another story blending covert ability, celebrity circles, and danger.

These are later Teddy Fay installments, not Books 1 through 3 of the complete franchise.

Stone Barrington books in Battles’s continuation run

1. Near Miss: Stone Barrington returns in a later continuation novel combining wealth, law, relationships, and danger in the established Stuart Woods universe.
2. Smolder: Stone becomes involved in another high-society threat where the apparent problem hides more serious consequences.
3. Finders Keepers: The continuation places Stone inside another conflict involving valuable interests and people prepared to use violence to protect them.
4. Deep Water (2026): Battles continues Stone’s adventures in a later series installment involving another dangerous situation that follows him beyond ordinary legal work.
5. Hostile Intent (expected November 17, 2026): The next announced Stone Barrington novel in Battles’s continuation run remains upcoming as of September 9, 2026.

Hostile Intent is not released yet. Keep it marked as forthcoming until its November 2026 publication date.

Why The Damaged is a prequel but still Book 13

The Damaged takes place fifteen years earlier, when Quinn was still building his reputation and Durrie was struggling professionally and personally.

Despite the earlier setting, the author numbers it as Book 13. Publication order is therefore the better first experience because readers already understand Quinn, Orlando, and Durrie before seeing the events that damaged those relationships.

The Vanished and The Taken form the current late Quinn arc

The Vanished reaches back to Quinn’s history with Mariko Hirahara and a mission that left him carrying guilt for years.

The Taken then brings back Dmitri Melnikov, a man Quinn believed had died in an earlier explosion. The rescue is personal, unofficial, and directly dependent on the relationships Quinn has accumulated through the long series.

That makes the newest books poor starting points even though Battles provides enough immediate context for the main plot.

A Brett Battles sampler across genres

1. The Cleaner: Begin with Battles’s defining espionage protagonist and the unusual profession of making covert-operation evidence disappear.
2. The Deceived: Continue to a Quinn case that becomes personal when one of his closest friends is killed.
3. Sick: Shift into apocalyptic fiction and the beginning of Project Eden’s population-reduction conspiracy.
4. Rewinder: Move into time travel and an alternate history created by one man’s mistake in the past.
5. The Excoms: Try a covert-action team built from operatives other organizations have discarded.
6. Night Man: Sample Battles’s more mystery-focused Nate and Jar series.
7. No Return: Finish with a standalone thriller and no continuing-series commitment.

Current Brett Battles series endpoints

As of September 9, 2026, the official Jonathan Quinn list runs through Book 16, The Taken, with Becoming Quinn separately numbered as the prequel.

Project Eden remains a completed seven-book sequence ending with Down. Rewinder remains a completed trilogy ending with Survivor. The Excoms currently has four listed novels, while the Night Man Chronicles has three through Mercy.

In the Stuart Woods continuation bibliography, Deep Water was released in June 2026 and Hostile Intent is scheduled for November 17, 2026.

Brett Battles reading order FAQ

What Brett Battles book should I read first?

The Cleaner is the natural starting point because it introduces Jonathan Quinn, Battles’s longest-running original protagonist.

Should Becoming Quinn be read before The Cleaner?

Not necessarily. It occurs earlier chronologically, but The Cleaner was designed as Quinn’s introduction. The prequel works well after readers already know the professional he becomes.

How many main Jonathan Quinn novels are there?

There are sixteen numbered main novels through The Taken, plus the prequel Becoming Quinn and several short stories.

Is Shadow of Betrayal the same as The Unwanted?

Yes. The Unwanted is the UK title for Shadow of Betrayal, so the two titles should not be counted as separate Quinn novels.

Does Project Eden have to be read in order?

Yes. The seven novels tell one continuing pandemic and resistance story, beginning with Sick and ending with Down.

How many Rewinder books are there?

There are three: Rewinder, Destroyer, and Survivor.

Are the Excoms part of Jonathan Quinn?

No. The Excoms is a separate team-based thriller series even though both series operate in covert-action territory.

What is the latest Jonathan Quinn book?

The Taken is Book 16 and the latest Jonathan Quinn novel listed by Battles as of this update.

Does Brett Battles now write Stuart Woods characters?

Yes. His recent bibliography includes continuation novels in both the Teddy Fay and Stone Barrington series.

The Brett Battles reading plan that prevents series mix-ups

Make Jonathan Quinn the main shelf and read from The Cleaner through The Taken, using Becoming Quinn and the short stories as optional additions.

Keep Project Eden completely separate and read all seven books from Sick through Down without skipping. Read Rewinder as its own three-book alternate-history sequence and the Excoms as a four-book covert-team series.

Place Logan Harper, Alexandra Poe, and the Night Man Chronicles on their own shelves, and keep the Stuart Woods continuation novels with the franchises they belong to. Battles writes across enough genres that series boundaries are much more useful than one giant publication-order list.