David Slaton

About the David Slaton series

David Slaton is a former Mossad assassin — codenamed Kidon — trying, across nine novels and counting, to retire from a trade that keeps pulling him back in for one more impossible job. Ward Larsen, a former F-16 fighter pilot and airline pilot, launched the character in his debut The Perfect Assassin (2004, later folded into the numbered series), then relaunched him a decade later with Assassin's Game (2014), the book most editions treat as the series' true starting point. From there Slaton is chased through a globe-spanning run of nuclear plots, terrorist conspiracies and government betrayals, all rendered with the technical precision of an author who has actually flown the aircraft his characters fly.

What separates Slaton from the usual black-ops protagonist is his ongoing, mostly unsuccessful attempt at a normal life — a wife and young daughter he's constantly trying to protect and shield from what he does, which gives the globe-trotting tradecraft real emotional stakes. Dark Vector (2025) marks a shift, introducing a new co-lead, CIA officer Tru Miller, alongside Slaton for what publishers have framed as a broader evolution of the series.

How to read this series

Most readers and the publisher itself treat Assassin's Game (2014) as the effective series starter — it's the version most commonly listed as "Book 1" on retailer pages, even though The Perfect Assassin (2004) technically introduced Slaton a decade earlier and is sometimes numbered as book 1 instead. Either way, read in publication order from there: Assassin's Silence, Assassin's Code, Assassin's Run, Assassin's Revenge, Assassin's Strike, the short prequel novella Assassin's Dawn, Assassin's Edge, Assassin's Mark, and finally Dark Vector (2025), which brings in new co-lead Tru Miller. The series is tightly serialized around Slaton's family and his history with various intelligence agencies, so skipping around will spoil major developments.