Tom Wood Books in Order

If you want Victor from the very beginning: The Hunter → The Enemy → The Game
If you like globe trotting spy action: Better Off Dead → The Darkest Day → A Time To Die
If you prefer character-focused stories: The Final Hour → Kill For Me → A Quiet Man
If you want quick, intense reads between novels: Bad Luck In Berlin → Gone by Dawn
If you enjoy psychological standalones: A Knock at the Door

Tom Wood is a British thriller writer best known for creating Victor, a professional assassin who stars in a long running series of action packed novels. Writing under his own name and a couple of pen names, he has built a career out of fast, tense stories about dangerous people making hard choices.

Wood was born in Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire and grew up in the English Midlands. As a teenager he loved films and video games more than schoolwork, but discovering The Lord of the Rings showed him how immersive a book could be. That spark led him toward storytelling even before he thought of it as a job.

Before he wrote fiction full time he worked a mix of creative and technical jobs, including a spell as a freelance editor and film maker. Learning to cut images and shape footage into a story later fed into the way he blocks out action on the page.

He has said he wanted to write about the kind of villain who would normally be the bad guy in a thriller, then stay with that character instead of cutting away when the hero appears.

That idea became The Hunter, published in 2010 in the United Kingdom and later in the United States under the title The Killer. The book introduces Victor, a nameless freelance assassin whose careful routine is shattered when a job in Paris goes wrong and he becomes the target. The novel launched the Victor the Assassin series, sending its antihero through a string of missions in cities around the world.

Since then Wood has written more than a dozen Victor books, including The Enemy, The Game, Better Off Dead, The Darkest Day, A Time to Die, The Final Hour, Kill For Me, A Quiet Man, Traitor and Unlucky for Some, along with short stories that fill in the gaps. Better Off Dead was selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club, bringing Victor to a wider audience and helping the series sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Victor is never softened into a traditional hero, and the books lean into his cold logic, grim humour and willingness to do terrible things to survive.

Wood’s thrillers are built around clear prose, tight pacing and detailed tradecraft. His background in film means chase scenes, shootouts and close quarters fights are written almost like storyboards, with careful attention to geography and cause and effect. He trains in Krav Maga and is a keen boxing fan, and that physical experience shapes the way violence in the books feels messy, exhausting and risky rather than effortless.

Alongside Victor, Wood has explored different corners of the genre under other names. Writing as T. W. Ellis he released the psychological thriller A Knock at the Door, in which a woman’s ordinary life collapses when strangers arrive asking for her husband. Under the pseudonym Sam Ripley he wrote The Rule of Three, a stand alone novel that leans further into creeping dread and urban legend.

Wood now lives in London and writes full time. He continues to add to Victor’s story while balancing it with new projects. His work has attracted interest from film and television producers, and a series based on the Victor novels has been put into development. For readers who like morally complex characters, precise action and a steady drip of tension, his books offer the feel of a modern action movie in prose form.