Below is the complete list of Elle Kennedy’s The Hunted books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
The Hunted Books
- Soldier Under Siege (2013)
View Book - Special Forces Rendezvous (2013)
View Book - Special Ops Exclusive (2013)
View Book
About The Hunted
Elle Kennedy’s The Hunted series comes from the romantic-suspense side of her bibliography and has a very different feel from the college and sports romances that later brought her a wider mainstream audience. On Kennedy’s official site, the series is a three-book line made up of Soldier Under Siege, Special Forces Rendezvous, and Special Ops Exclusive. All three books are linked not just by genre but by a shared world of covert operations, political instability, fugitive movement, and dangerous attraction under pressure.
What defines the series is speed and intensity. These are not slow-burn community romances or campus stories built around social banter and everyday emotional drift. They are compact romantic thrillers driven by immediate peril. The characters are operating inside conspiracies, armed conflict, and unstable political conditions, and the romances develop in the middle of that chaos rather than beside it. Kennedy uses that structure well. The suspense is not decorative; it shapes the relationships themselves. Trust becomes a real problem, not just an emotional one, because secrecy, deception, and survival are built into the plot from the start.
The setting of San Marquez is especially important to the series’ identity. Kennedy uses it as more than a generic danger zone. The country’s unrest, corruption, and violent power struggles give the books a harsh, high-stakes atmosphere that separates The Hunted from more polished or glamorous romantic suspense. In Soldier Under Siege, Eva Dolce and special ops captain Robert Tate are bound together by revenge and by a mission tied to a ruthless enemy. In Special Forces Rendezvous, the threat expands into a deadly-virus conspiracy involving Sebastian Stone and Dr. Julia Davenport. By the time Special Ops Exclusive arrives, the series is still working in that same volatile register, pairing journalist Rebecca Parker with Nick Prescott in the middle of revolution and government intrigue. Those individual stories differ, but they all operate inside the same broad promise: danger first, desire close behind, and emotional vulnerability made more complicated by the fact that almost nobody can be trusted completely.
That shared structure is what gives the series cohesion. The books are connected enough to feel like a true series, but they are not weighed down by a huge mythology or endless cast management. Kennedy keeps the focus tight. Each novel has its own central pairing and its own immediate crisis, yet the line holds together because the tone stays consistent: militarized suspense, international instability, sexual tension, and heroes and heroines who are forced into closeness by circumstances that would normally make intimacy impossible. The result is a series that feels concentrated rather than sprawling.
The Hunted is also useful as a reminder of Kennedy’s range. Long before readers associated her mainly with hockey players and campus romance, she was writing stories built around special-ops figures, fugitives, journalists, doctors, and women caught in violent political situations. These books are leaner and more externally driven than her later contemporary-romance work, but they already show one of her consistent strengths: she knows how to pair fast narrative momentum with emotionally charged central relationships. Even in a story full of gunfire, pursuit, and conspiracies, she stays interested in chemistry, conflict, and the question of whether two wary people can become honest with each other before the world around them closes in.
Seen beneath an already completed list, The Hunted is best understood as a compact romantic-suspense trilogy with a strong action spine. Its appeal lies in urgency, danger, and tightly drawn pairings rather than in broad world-building or extended social continuity. Kennedy uses the three books to create a connected but efficient series, one where political violence, covert missions, and high emotional stakes all work together to produce a sharper, more hard-edged kind of romance.