Jim Chapel Missions Books In Order

Publication Order of Jim Chapel Books

“The Jim Chapel Missions” are a series of novels by David Wellington the American horror, fantasy, science fiction, and thriller writer best known for the “Zombie Trilogy” series of novels. The first novel of the series was “Chimera: A Jim Chapel Mission” that was first published in 2013. Over the course of a career spanning more than a decade, Wellington has written more than twenty novels that have been translated into more than ten languages with several becoming global phenomenons. His career began when a friend suggested that he post chapters of his novel every week on his website. It was not long before the serialized stories were so popular that he was approached by Thunder’s Mouth Press to publish his serialized work “Monster Island” in print. Before he became a fully-fledged writer, he got his bachelors from Syracuse University and went to the Pratt Institute from which he graduated with a master in Library Science. Since 2003 he worked for the UN digitizing their records to make them easily accessible on digital platforms. His UN job was a mundane one though he found meeting the aristocrats, ex KGB agents and the most controversial of people that gave him ideas about terrorism and espionage from their own experiences. These would later inspire him to write many of his horror, science fiction, and fantasy novels. He currently lives with Elisabeth his wife and Mary Shelley their dog in New York City.

Even as Wellington has always loved to read and write novels and books in all manner of genres, since he was a kid, his favorite has been the classic horrors from the likes of Arthur Machen, Poe, and Lovecraft. His favorite monster is “Frankenstein’s Monster”, as he asserts that he makes for an existential loneliness that he can connect with both in the Universal film adaptation and Mary Shelley’s novel. However, growing up his biggest influence that perhaps informs his writing of the “Jim Chapel Missions” series was the idea of nuclear war. Having lived during the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war was very real and inevitable. He would read tons of books from the likes of “Babylon”, “Alas”, and “On The Beach” and watch the post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” movies. Back then, he had been intrigued by apocalypse fiction as he thought the idea of roaring around the desert in modified buggies and crazy clothes seemed like fun even if all crops had failed and life had become difficult. Even though he has never thought of himself as a thriller or horror writer, the novels in his series such as “Chimera” keep on coming to him after he met soldiers coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq and seeing their stories on TV.

“The Jim Chapel Mission” novels are thriller narratives about Jim Chapel, an Afghanistan special operations veteran who lost his arm and came back home. As a person that had undergone a hellish experience, he shows so much courage that he would be ready to go back if it was asked of him, despite his horrible injury. He thought a life of action was over for good until he comes back home to find that there is a new crisis looming, and there is no one that can confront it except for him. He soon learns that he has been chosen for a special mission, some kind of destiny thing. Jim Chapel displays an incredible sense of honor and dignity similar to many veterans of the Iraqi and Afghanistani wars who come home from often traumatic experiences to try to reconstruct their lives. He had to live and fight in terrible conditions but came back to keep his head down, not asking for a parade or complaining, but living in quiet courage. For Jim Chapel, the loss of an arm does not make him a burden on society as he believes he can be just as a useful to society as the next man. Alongside Jim is Angel who acts a little voice and guide to him. She helps him dig for information on criminal databases, get him important equipment, find directions, and even steal cars for his operations.

“Chimera: A Jim Chapel Mission” is the first novel of the Jim Chapel Mission series of novels that combines the science and horror of Michael Crichton with the wild imagination of James Rollins and Patrick Lee. Jim Chapel and his associates are the unlikely heroes that need to expose a reprehensible cabal that is planning to unleash a devastating attack that would destroy the world as we know it. Seven super soldiers attached to a secret army facility go missing, leaving behind a trail of bodies all over New York. The soldiers have gone rogue and have declared that seven more innocents will die in the coming days. James Chase a disabled special ops agent that had served in Iraq is drafted to help stop the seven rogues. With the help of Angel, a courageous veterinarian that is as mysterious as she is beautiful, he sets out to track down the seven soldiers in a hunt across the United States. But as he investigates the case he begins to find that the soldiers thought to have gone rogue may just be the vanguard of a larger conspiracy with a nightmarish plan.

“The Hydra Protocol” the second novel in the series sees Jim Chapel a Special Forces veteran try to prevent nuclear annihilation. Jim Chapel needs to infiltrate one of the most secretive of Russian military installations, where he has to disable a supercomputer that controls all the country’s nuclear arsenal. Jim Chapel finds himself back in action despite a life threatening injury and meets a beautiful Russian agent Nadia. Nadia tells him about HYDRA, a supercomputer thought to be obsolete since the Cold War. The supercomputer was still in action and still controlled hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at Western countries. All it takes is a simple fail-safe error and much of the US and Western Europe will be destroyed. To make it worse, the old supercomputer has a lot of programming errors in its code. To once and for all destroy the threat of nuclear winter, Chapel and Nadia need to cross Eastern Europe to infiltrate a military installation in a former Soviet state. But it is an uneasy alliance that could unravel since not everyone is interested in destroying the supercomputer. It is an action packed and high adrenaline adventure that is a combination of the thrills of James Rollins and Lee Child.