Tim Ayliffe Books In Order

Publication Order of John Bailey Books

Tim Ayliffe is an Australian author and journalist. Ayliffe has worked in the journalism industry for around twenty years. He started writing with his first book, The Greater Good which is the first book in a three-book series featuring his lead character John Bailey. He followed that book up with State of Fear and then Nowhere Man.

Tim worked in London for Sky News as a digital and telvision journalist. He would work there for a number of years before making his way to ABC in Australia. Tim joined ABC in 2006 and he has worked as a TV News Editor as well as Executive Prodcuer of ABC News Breakfast.

In his free time Tim enjoys spending time with his wife, Justin Dougherty and their two children. He lives in Sydney, Australia with his family and enjoys surfing and riding bikes when he’s not writing or doing his journalism job.

With writing fiction, Ayliffe finds that you can often get closer to the truth than you can with writing non-fiction as fiction allows you to get into the story and inside people’s heads and exposes their true motivations. The freedom of writing fiction is something that he loves and what drew him to writing after years in journalism.

The inspiration for The Greater Good came to him after having a real-life conversation with a source that he knew from his journalism work. The source, a United States official, asked him if he could ever see the day when Australia turned their back on the the United States in favor of a closer relationship with China. With China growing as a superpower in the world and looking to surpass the United States, it is not outside of the realm of possibility down the line.

This lead to Ayliffe thinking about the idea and what would happen if this sort of thing took place. How would it start? What would happen? He began compiling a list of “what ifs” in his head and really go the creative juices going with regards to this book. He decided to set the book in the real world with a big geopolitical aspect to it that has parallels to the world we live in. The idea is that Australia is caught in the middle between the US and China. The story gave him the position to write the nation as an international player, and it allowed him to set the story on his home soil.

Ayliffe knew that we were living in a more international world these days and that readers were less likely to care where the story was at. They are just looking for a good story and compared it to the success of Nordic Noir liek the Kurt Wallander books or the books by Stieg Larsson. He also was inspired by Jane Harper’s The Dry which put Australia on the map in terms of a setting for a book.

He has a real love/hate relationship with Sydney and thinks that a lot of people share that opinion. He even put a line in his book that Sydney is a “bullshitter’s paradise” as it’s a beautiful city, but there is a lot that lies below the surface there. For his book, he was happy to look at the negatives.

The Greater Good is the first book in the John Bailey series of books. The book sees a batter war correspondent named John Bailey who is living his life on the edge. He finds that his dreams are haunted by nightmares of being kidnapped and tortured in Iraq, he tries to drink to drown out the memories but it’s not working. He is fighting to get his life back together when he gets the story that will put him back into the spotlight. The only problem is that this story is going to put him directly into the crosshairs of a dangerous player.

It all starts when a beautiful prostitue is murdered in a luxury Sydney apartment. Bailey is told to cover the story by his editor who feels that he is unable to trust anyone else at the paper. Bailey’s investigation will lead him to one of the victim’s clients, a key advisor to the Defence Minister who is the prime suspect and now on the run. The advisor contacts Bailey with some information that he says could bring down the whole government which puts Bailey in the crosshairs. Bailey is investigating this one while at the same time, the police detecitve assigned to his case is a woman he walked out on a decage ago. Bailey knows that he has stumbled on the story of a lifetime, but the ruthless CIA fixer and Chinese agents that are after are trying to make sure that he doesn’t live long enough to tell it.

Ayliffe followed that book up with State of Fear. This book picks up after the events of the first book as John Bailey is attempting to start living a more normal life. That all goes out the window when a terrorist murders a woman right in front of him on the streets of London. The attack was put together by Mustafa al-Baghdadi. He’s number one on the FBI’s most wanted list and he just so happens to be the same man who tortured Bailey in Fallujah a decade ago. Mustafa has held a grudge against Bailey for all of these years and has an axe to grind against him. He taunts Bailey with threats of more attacks and the people in Bailey’s life, people back in Sydney, have become targets of the terrorist. Bailey is in over his head and turns to the only man he knows who can help, ruthless CIA veteran Ronnie Johnson, and the two will work together to bring down the world’s most deadly terrorist.

One Response to “Tim Ayliffe”

1. John Smith: 2 years ago

   Quite often, one cannot always read books in the order in which they were written and so is the case with The Greater Good. I had read the other two first and have just finished Tim Ayliffe’s first book. However, I have to say that they are very good and well written and believable. Knowing parts of the world in which an author weaves into the story is a bonus and helps to paint and secure a picture in one’s mind. I am waiting for another book by Tim Ayliffe, hopefully with John Bailey striving to bring to justice to society, via the pen.

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