Below is the complete list of Tess Gerritsen’s The Martini Club books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of The Martini Club Books
About The Martini Club
Tess Gerritsen’s Martini Club series is a late-career turn into spy fiction, built around retired intelligence operatives who have tried to disappear into small-town life but remain far too dangerous, resourceful, and well connected to stay quietly retired. The books center on Maggie Bird, a former CIA operative living in Purity, Maine, where she raises chickens, keeps to herself, and meets regularly with a group of fellow former spies. To outsiders, the Martini Club looks like a harmless book group. In reality, it is a circle of veterans whose old instincts never went away.
The series begins with The Spy Coast, which establishes both Maggie’s past and her chosen refuge. Purity appears to offer exactly the kind of anonymity she wants after a failed operation ended her career and left lasting damage behind. That peace is shattered when violence arrives at her home and forces her to confront enemies connected to the life she thought she had escaped. Gerritsen uses the opening book to combine two very different pleasures: the small-town murder investigation and the international spy thriller. Maggie may live among farms, neighbors, and seaside quiet, but her memories reach across Bangkok, Istanbul, London, Malta, and the shadow world of covert work.
What makes the series distinctive is its treatment of age and retirement. Maggie and her friends are not nostalgic observers of a younger person’s adventure. They are the adventure, even when younger police officers underestimate them. Their bodies may be older and their public lives deliberately ordinary, but they still possess tradecraft, contacts, strategic patience, and a willingness to act when danger gets close. The result is not simply a gimmick about elderly spies. Gerritsen uses the Martini Club to explore what happens when people trained for secrecy, violence, and deception attempt to build ordinary second lives.
Acting Police Chief Jo Thibodeau is essential to that structure. She is not part of Maggie’s old CIA circle, which makes her both obstacle and counterweight. Jo represents official local law enforcement, while Maggie and her friends operate from experience, instinct, and habits formed far outside normal jurisdiction. Their tension gives the books much of their energy: Jo wants procedure, transparency, and control; the Martini Club knows that some threats cannot be handled by ordinary small-town methods.
The Summer Guests keeps the action close to Purity while deepening the local side of the series. The town’s summer season brings tourists, disorder, and eventually a missing teenager near the lake. When someone close to the Martini Club becomes a suspect, Maggie and her friends are pulled into another investigation that forces cooperation, friction, and competing methods into the open. The book shows that Gerritsen is not using Purity merely as a quiet backdrop. It is a community full of pressures, reputations, seasonal tensions, and secrets of its own.
The Shadow Friends continues the same balance of local danger and old espionage lives, with a murder at a resort and the disappearance of Ingrid, one of Maggie’s friends. By this stage, the series has made clear that the Martini Club is not defined only by Maggie’s past. Each member carries history, capability, and vulnerability, giving the group a broader emotional foundation.
The Martini Club books differ from Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isles novels in both pace and texture. They are less forensic and more espionage-driven, less focused on autopsy rooms and homicide units than on memory, tradecraft, betrayal, and second acts. Yet they still carry Gerritsen’s familiar strengths: clean suspense structure, professional competence under pressure, danger intruding into personal life, and women whose intelligence makes them formidable. The series works because retirement, in Maggie Bird’s world, is not an ending. It is cover.