Below is the complete list of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ The Fixer books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
The Fixer Books in Publication Order
- The Fixer / The Ruling Class (2015)
View Book - The Long Game / Lessons in Power (2016)
View Book - Lessons in Power (2025)
View Book - The Ruling Class (2025)
View Book
About The Fixer
Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Fixer books take the machinery of a political thriller and compress it into a young adult series that feels unusually sleek, fast, and self-assured. These novels are not built around spies in the traditional sense, but they share that genre’s love of secrets, leverage, hidden loyalties, and the dangerous gap between public image and private truth. What makes the series distinctive is the way Barnes filters all of that through a teenage perspective without making it feel small. Washington power brokers, family legacies, prep-school scandals, and personal reinvention all operate on the same board, and the result is a duology that feels both intimate and high-stakes.
At the center is Tess Kendrick, who arrives in Washington, D.C., after being raised far from that world. Tess is a strong lead for exactly the reason Barnes often writes strong leads well: she is observant, stubborn, and not naturally impressed by status. Her estranged older sister Ivy is one of the capital’s most effective “fixers,” a person who solves problems for the powerful before those problems become public disasters. That premise gives the series its shape. Tess is pulled into an environment where influence is currency, information is a weapon, and appearances are never just appearances.
The first novel, The Fixer, is especially effective in the way it introduces this world through dislocation. Tess is not a polished insider. She has to read the room, learn the rules, and decide which ones are worth breaking. Barnes uses that outsider perspective to make the politics legible without overexplaining them. Hardwicke, the elite school Tess attends, is not just a school setting with expensive blazers and connected families. It functions as a smaller version of the adult world around it, where students inherit networks, secrets, expectations, and damage long before they are old enough to escape them. That mirroring is one of the series’ best ideas.
The second book, The Long Game, deepens the story rather than simply repeating the concept. By then, the series no longer needs to prove that a teen fixer in Washington can work as a premise. Instead, it can push further into consequences: family history, political power, and the way private loyalties become entangled with public pressure. Barnes is good at escalation. The stakes rise, but they rise out of what was already there. The duology keeps its momentum because the tension is not only about solving the next problem. It is also about how Tess’s understanding of herself changes as she learns what kind of legacy she has been pulled into.
The family dimension matters as much as the thriller element. Tess and Ivy give the series much of its emotional weight. Their relationship is shaped by absence, secrecy, and unequal knowledge, and Barnes handles that friction well. Ivy is not reduced to a glamorous mystery figure, and Tess is not merely reacting to her. Their connection gives the books a center that keeps the political intrigue from becoming abstract.
In tone, The Fixer books are sharp, witty, and tense without becoming grim. Barnes writes dialogue and social maneuvering particularly well, so even scenes built around conversation feel active. The books also show an early version of what later became one of her signatures: stories about young people navigating systems designed by older, more powerful players. That through-line links this series to much of her later work.
For readers who already have the list above, The Fixer is best seen as a compact, tightly connected duology rather than a long-running saga. Its appeal lies in the cleanness of the concept, the control of the execution, and the way Jennifer Lynn Barnes turns reputation, secrecy, and influence into the engine of both character and suspense.