Books like Order of Assassins
A Victorian whaling voyage may seem far removed from Jones’s world, but The North Water captures the same intoxicating mixture of hard men, dangerous fellowship and violence stripped of romance. Together, these three novels pursue the qualities that make Order of Assassins bite: martial authenticity, treacherous loyalties and characters whose competence cannot protect their souls.
If you liked Order of Assassins, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Order of Assassins, and we tell you exactly what.
McGuire confines a shipload of damaged, dangerous men aboard a nineteenth-century whaler heading into Arctic darkness. Like Jones, he understands how rough humour, professional skill and shared peril can bind men who neither like nor trust one another—and how quickly that bond can become a trap.
The combat here is less organized, but no less visceral: bodies have weight, violence has consequences, and survival repeatedly tests the difference between toughness and moral surrender. McGuire’s prose is exceptionally physical without becoming showy. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and widely acclaimed on publication, The North Water is the literary novel for readers who want historical adventure to retain its mud, blood and menace.
If Order of Assassins thrilled you by placing formidable fighters inside a struggle of faith, politics and personal allegiance, The Religion is indispensable. Against the opening stages of the Great Siege of Malta, mercenary Mattias Tannhauser enters a world where every faction has sacred justifications and thoroughly worldly appetites.
Willocks writes close combat with frightening clarity, yet the novel’s real force comes from its moral scale. Tannhauser is neither a polished knight nor a modern conscience in costume: he is intelligent, compromised and lethally adapted to his age. The result is a huge, feverishly intense historical adventure with a devoted reputation among readers of serious military fiction. Few novels make brutality, theology and erotic vitality feel so dangerously inseparable.
Robert Low’s first Oathsworn novel offers the closest equivalent to Jones’s addictive fellowship of warriors. Young Orm joins a Viking war band held together by sworn loyalty, caustic banter, greed and the knowledge that each man’s life may shortly depend upon the others. Their camaraderie feels lived rather than manufactured; Low, a former war correspondent, never mistakes battlefield excitement for cleanliness or glory.
The narration is lean, sardonic and full of tactile detail—ship timbers, bad weather, worn equipment and the confusion of fighting at arm’s length. Yet beneath the momentum lies a compelling question: what does an oath demand when loyalty conflicts with fear or self-preservation? The Whale Road launched the much-loved Oathsworn series, and it is easy to see why readers keep following these men into danger.