Below is the complete list of Don Bentley books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Matt Drake Books
- Without Sanction (2020)
Without Sanction was published in 2020 and is listed as book #1 in the Matt Drake series. 
Publication Order of Jack Ryan Universe Books
Publication Order of Mitch Rapp Books
Publication Order of Jack Ryan, Jr. / Campus Books
About Don Bentley
Don Bentley is an American military and espionage novelist whose fiction draws directly on experience as an Army aviator, FBI special agent, and technology specialist supporting the United States special-operations community. He created the Matt Drake thriller series before taking responsibility for two major continuation franchises: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Jr. novels and Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series. Across these distinct bodies of work, Bentley specializes in covert missions, intelligence failures, technological threats, and operatives carrying the psychological consequences of decisions made in war.
Bentley earned a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Ohio State University and served for approximately a decade as a United States Army Apache helicopter pilot. His assignments took him to South Korea, Germany, and Texas. During a deployment to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, he served as a troop commander and received the Bronze Star Medal and the Air Medal with “V” device for valor.
After leaving the Army, Bentley joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He worked as a special agent on foreign-intelligence and counterintelligence matters and served with the Dallas field office’s Special Weapons and Tactics team. He later entered the private technology sector, working with companies developing equipment for American special-operations forces. These stages of his career supplied different elements of his fiction: aviation and combat leadership from the military, investigations and source recruitment from the FBI, and an understanding of emerging capabilities from defense technology.
Bentley completed an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University before publishing his debut, Without Sanction, in 2020. The novel introduced Matt Drake, a Defense Intelligence Agency operative haunted by a failed mission in Syria. Drake’s adventures combine international action with survivor’s guilt, institutional betrayal, and the complicated bonds formed among people who have operated together in dangerous environments. The Outside Man, Hostile Intent, and Forgotten War continued the series, gradually revealing more about Drake’s military past, friendships, and difficult relationship with the agencies that employ him.
Bentley next entered Tom Clancy’s fictional universe with Target Acquired. His four Jack Ryan Jr. novels place the Campus operative inside conflicts involving political assassination, North Korean instability, confrontation in the Pacific, weapons trafficking, and compromised intelligence networks. Bentley preserved the technological and geopolitical scope associated with Clancy while placing particular emphasis on Jack’s field decisions, physical vulnerability, and struggle to live up to a family legacy that attracts both allies and enemies.
In 2024, Bentley succeeded Kyle Mills as the continuing author of Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series. Rather than moving immediately beyond the most recent point in Rapp’s career, Capture or Kill returned to the period surrounding the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Denied Access moved further back into Rapp’s early operational history, continuing directly from events established in Flynn’s Kill Shot. This approach allows Bentley to work within unresolved spaces in the character’s chronology while preserving the intensity, loyalty, and moral severity that define Rapp.
His bibliography is best divided into three clear sections: the independently created Matt Drake novels, the Jack Ryan Jr. continuation books, and the Mitch Rapp installments. Bentley’s professional history informs all three without turning the stories into fictionalized memoir. His strongest recurring concern is the cost of sanctioned violence—what governments ask operatives to do, what institutions conceal afterward, and how those operatives continue functioning when duty, friendship, and conscience no longer point in the same direction.