After his traumatic time in Kazakhstan, Elliot Kane has left the Intelligence Services and is quietly lecturing on obscure subjects in Oxford. He is, naturally, dragged back to investigate the suspicious suicide of someone he had worked with previously. This was on Ascension Island, a small, bleak island in the South Atlantic which has great significance for international communications and hence for intelligence agencies. A frankly rather mundane plot develops in which Kane, very clumsily for an experienced undercover agent, looks into dodgy goings-on on the island.
It’s fine in its way, but unlike A Shadow Intelligence, this seemed like a pretty run-of-the-mill whodunnit with some espionage stuff thrown in. Oliver Harris doesn’t quite manage to develop a sense of place as he did so well before, nor does he give such a good picture of the messy, murky world of geopolitics. They’re there, but far less convincing this time, as Kane blunders about drawing attention to himself and it ends with a race-against-time climax which left me pretty cold.
This is a perfectly decent beach read, but I was expecting far more from Harris and I can only give this a rather lukewarm recommendation.
(My thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.)
No comments:
Post a Comment