Prime Video just dated The Terminal List season 2 for October 21st, and Chris Pratt's James Reece is a fugitive when it picks up. If you only know Reece from the show, you're about eight books behind.
That's the thing about this franchise. The series is adapting novels Jack Carr wrote years ago, while Carr keeps getting further ahead of it.
So here's where the books stand.
Carr spent twenty years in the Navy, from 1996 to 2016, and retired as a Commander in Naval Special Warfare. He started out as an enlisted sniper, took a commission, and finished his career leading special operations units. He doesn't publicly detail unit numbers or deployment specifics, which is standard practice for former operators and worth respecting.
He published The Terminal List in 2018, and it turned into a career!
The James Reece novels have run in order ever since: True Believer in 2019, Savage Son in 2020, The Devil's Hand in 2021, In the Blood in 2022, Only the Dead in 2023, and Red Sky Mourning in 2024.
That second one is the one to note right now. Season 2 adapts True Believer, which sends Reece overseas as a hunted man who gets offered a way back in, and Amazon shot it in South Africa and Morocco to match.
Book 8 is State of Exile, and retailers currently have it slated for October 2027. Carr announced it back in June on his own channel with a spring window attached, so that date has already moved once, and books this far out tend to move again.
The setup he's published for it is enormous. A frantic phone call from a doomed plane on 9/11. A sixth-generation fighter jet shot down over Ukraine with its technology in enemy hands. The Taj Mahal in ruins. Two nuclear powers on the brink of war.
And Reece in self-imposed exile, holding a code that could stop all of it, if he could reach a memory he doesn't know he has.
Compare that to book 1, where a SEAL comes home and hunts the people who killed his platoon. The scale has gone somewhere else entirely!
Two recent titles trip people up, because they look like Reece novels on a shelf and aren't.
Cry Havoc came out in 2025, and it follows Tom Reece, a different generation of the family, in a Vietnam-era story. Publishers number it as its own line rather than slotting it into the James Reece count, which is why State of Exile is still book 8 and not book 9.
Then there's The Fourth Option, which landed this past May. Carr co-wrote it with M.P. Woodward, and it launches a completely new series with a new lead in former SEAL and CIA officer Chris Walker. Reece isn't in it.
He writes non-fiction too, with historian James M. Scott. Targeted: Beirut covered the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, and a follow-up on Pan Am 103 is on the way.
Carr isn't a name on a copyright page here. He executive produces the series alongside Pratt, Antoine Fuqua and showrunner David DiGilio, and he's been on it from day one. We sat down with him and Fuqua back when season 1 launched, and that involvement is a big reason the show's military detail holds up as well as it does.
It also means the adaptation has runway. Seven James Reece novels are already on shelves and the show has adapted one of them.
Season 2 makes two.
Are you reading ahead of the show, or would you rather hit each season cold? For anyone already through Red Sky Mourning, how long is that wait to 2027 going to feel?
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