Steven Konkoly
Steven Konkoly is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and US Naval Academy graduate who served eight years on active duty in the Navy and Marine Corps before turning to fiction. His Black Flagged series — eight novels following a deep-cover CIA paramilitary operator in the years after the Cold War — is one of the most technically credible military thriller series in the genre. His new Garrett Mann series picks up where Black Flagged left off in everything that matters: operational authenticity, geopolitical texture, and the question of what men who've done classified things for their country do when the country's promises run out.
Background
Steven Konkoly graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served as a Surface Warfare Officer and in Naval Special Warfare (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) for eight years before leaving active duty. That combination — the strategic education of Annapolis, the operational experience of EOD, the institutional knowledge of how the Navy and Marine Corps actually function — gives his fiction a texture that's difficult to fake and easy to recognise.
He started publishing independently and built his audience through the Black Flagged series, which launched in 2012. The series follows Karl Berg, a CIA analyst, and Ryan Decker, a former Marine Recon-turned-deep-cover CIA paramilitary officer, through a series of operations that span from Eastern Europe to South America to the American homeland. The geopolitical scenarios feel like they were drawn from actual threat assessments rather than invented for narrative convenience.
Konkoly is based in the United States and has expanded beyond military thrillers into post-apocalyptic and contemporary thriller territory, but his military fiction work remains the core of his reputation. The Black Flagged series concluded with Vindicta in 2022, and his new Garrett Mann series launched in March 2026, marking a return to the contemporary special operations thriller space that best showcases what makes his writing distinctive.
The Writing
Black Flagged reads like it was written by someone who has been in classified spaces and seen how the machinery of covert action actually works. The CIA tradecraft is convincing. The operational planning is realistic — threats are assessed, contingencies are planned, things go wrong in ways that feel like they could actually go wrong. Decker is not a superhero; he's an exceptionally trained professional who survives through preparation and tactical competence, not plot armour.
The series is also unusually good on the political dimension of covert action. The decisions made in Langley — the bureaucratic inertia, the career protection instincts, the genuine ambiguity about what's sanctioned and what isn't — feel authentic. Konkoly has clearly thought about the interface between intelligence agencies and military operators, and the friction between those worlds drives much of the series' best tension.
The new Garrett Mann series carries those strengths forward. A True Kill, the first book, positions Garrett Mann as a former special operations officer working in the grey zone between government sanction and freelance operations — a recognisable archetype handled with the technical specificity that separates Konkoly from writers who've simply done their research from the outside.
Upcoming Releases
A True Kill
Book 1 of the Garrett Mann series. A former special operations officer navigating the grey zone between sanctioned and unsanctioned operations in a world where the old rules no longer apply.
The Series
Black Flagged
Eight novels following CIA paramilitary operator Ryan Decker and analyst Karl Berg through operations that span Eastern Europe, South America, and the American homeland. The complete series.