I thought A Shadow Intelligence was excellent. It is literate, exciting, very well researched and convincing.
Elliot Kane is an agent for British Intelligence. He is something of a superman, in that he speaks lots of arcane languages well enough to recognise regional dialects, has all sorts of technical and semi-criminal skills, knows a huge number of extremely influential people and so on. However, I didn’t find this too far-fetched; his background is sketched in skilfully and convincingly enough to account for his current abilities.
Kane is suddenly pulled out of a long-term spying mission in the Middle East to find that a colleague and lover is missing. He discovers enough to follow her to Kazakhstan where a very complex web of intrigue emerges in which Oliver Harris paints a very realistic picture of the clandestine complexities of modern geopolitics. Huge multinationals, governments, private security companies, local warlords and so on all jockey, cheat and lie for their own advantage and Kane becomes caught in the middle.
It’s a somewhat labyrinthine plot with a lot of characters and organisations in play, which can become a little bewildering at times, but it’s also very convincing. Harris portrays the background in Kazakhstan excellently. He is also very, very good on the information war and the use of fake imagery and stories to foment unrest and to justify unjustifiable actions. The writing is very good, the action plausible and the characters generally very believable. I was thoroughly engrossed and also relieved by the absence of many clichés of the genre. It was an excellent read with some real content, too, and I will definitely read Ascension, the next in the series. Warmly recommended.
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