Liam Kelly

Liam Kelly

What happens when a King’s Counsel turns his legal and geopolitical expertise to the world of political thrillers? Meet Liam Kelly, Australian barrister, King’s Counsel and author of the Harry O’Connor series.



Liam holds Honours degrees in Law and English Literature from The University of Queensland, where he graduated with numerous academic awards, including the University Medal in Law. In 1989, he was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship for Queensland and went on to study the Bachelor of Civil Law at Magdalen College, Oxford.

After Oxford, Liam lived and worked in Germany, developing a lifelong fascination with international affairs, politics and European history, influences that continue to shape his writing.

Called to the Bar in 1992 and appointed Senior Counsel in 2005, Liam has built a distinguished legal career spanning more than three decades. Based in Sydney, he practises primarily in commercial litigation and arbitration, with work taking him across jurisdictions around the world.

🖋️ Now, that experience informs his fiction.

Forged in Shadow, the first novel in the Harry O’Connor series, brings together Liam’s legal insight, fascination with geopolitics and lifelong love of literature.

Inspired by writers including Vince Flynn, Mark Greaney and Lee Child, Liam takes readers behind the familiar world of elite operatives and asks a far more intriguing question: How is an assassin made?

Forged in Shadow: Book 1

Every assassin has a beginning. This is Harry O’Connor’s.

He was raised to protect.

Trained to survive.

When danger closes in, Harry O’Connor must choose: become his father’s creation or forge his own path.

Smart. Athletic. Reserved. Harry O’Connor appears to be an ordinary young man finishing high school on Australia’s quiet Northern New South Wales coast.

He is anything but.

After his mother’s death, Harry is raised by his father Reece, a former SAS soldier turned mercenary, shaped by guilt, love, rigid discipline and a war that never ends. Growing up among men who carry out missions governments will never acknowledge, Harry knows what his father is, even if no one says it aloud.

Then a devastating terrorist attack in Tel Aviv changes everything. Forced to move to the United States with Reece and his band of mercenaries, Harry must decide once and for all who he will become … as the violence he has been trained for closes in.



For readers who love Vince Flynn, Mark Greaney, Brad Thor, Jack Carr and Daniel Silva, Forged in Shadow offers the realism, geopolitics and insider perspective that make political thrillers so compelling.