Press & Media

James O'Neill is the author of The Key Series — British espionage thrillers grounded in real tradecraft. His debut, The Lost Key, was followed by The Grey Wind. Both are available on Kindle, all major eBook platforms, and paperback. He writes about operators, analysts, and the quiet wars fought inside networks and institutions.

James O'Neill spent over twenty years in UK Special Forces and private security consulting — the kind of career that exists in operational reports and nowhere else. He did not set out to write fiction. He set out to solve problems: quietly, without attribution, in places that do not feature in press briefings. That discipline shapes everything he writes. His Key Series follows ex-special forces operator James O'Neill and senior MI5 officer Sarah Sterling as they deal with the fallout from a stolen GCHQ simulation drive and the rise of The Grey Wind — a model built to detect hostile activity across the UK's power, data, and financial systems. The tradecraft in these novels is not invented or researched from the outside. It is the residue of a long career — the field logic, the institutional compromises, the texture of work done far from cameras and official statements.