For me the second half where media, disinformation and social network manipulation was the best part. It feels eerily plausible (if a bit unrealistically accelerate time-wise) given the post-truth world we live in. Overall the story felt implausible as the hero just leaves his spy organization and runs into people who he knew from past missions in other areas of the world who can help him just the right way. Still, it was an easy read. ( )

Elliot Kane is an academic, a poet, turned spy. He’s seriously considering returning to the literary world but for now is traveling, spying, manipulating events and people. He returns from Saudi Arabia when his operation is inexplicably cut short. He discovers his colleague and surreptitious lover Joanna Lake has left MI6 under a cloud after her own operation was aborted. She sends him an emergency message from Kazakhstan, then goes missing. Elliot goes to find her under his own power after his debriefers at MI6 bid him to stick around.

In Kazakhstan he stumbles onto an elaborate scheme to destabilize the country using social media. It’s leading up to the apparent discovery of a new oil field and the possibility of Russia moving in to annex part of Kazakhstan.

This a smart labyrinth of an espionage novel, even hyper-intelligent, as one character is described. Oliver Harris is particularly adept at detailing the many technical facets of cyber warfare: encryption, bots, social media manipulation, fake videos, malware, spyware. The story is rich in the details of espionage and surveillance and the pace never slows. ( )

Well who is reading this in 2022? Much of what happens seemed to be taking place in Kazakhstan in January and now Russia has troops set to invade Ukraine. Too many subplots and a lot to process, but still a very topical read. ( )

modern spy thriller. lots of social media stuff. in the end a bit too tidily wrapped up? ( )

Elliot Kane is a senior MI6 officer who, as the novel opens, has been engaged at the sharp end of an operation in Saudi Arabia that has just been compromised, with his agent arrested and imprisoned. Kane himself only just escapes from the agent’s house in time, where he has been endeavouring either to recover, or failing that, destroy, any incriminating documentation. He returns to London, to face an uncomfortable debriefing.

While adjusting to London life again, he receives, through complex back channels, an email from another of his field agents, warning him that he is in danger. Alarming under any circumstances, this is all the more striking as the agent in question had died several months previously. Kane realises that it was from his former partner, Joanna, who happened also to be the previous handler of that particular agent, who had helped establish the secret communication protocols. It is more than six months since Kane had had any contact with Joanna, and she now seems to have disappeared completely.

Placed on the intelligence community’s equivalent of ‘gardening leave’, Kane starts to investigate what might have happened to Joanna, which involves going over her most recent operations. These had involved her explorations of psyops, which had been her particular field of expertise, which had led her to an operation in Kazakhstan, where various western oil companies were competing for lucrative contracts as the country endeavoured to secure foreign exchange, and escape from its former complete dependency on Russia.

Oliver Harris sets the scenario very capably, and I found the background material about Kazakhstan utterly engrossing. (To be honest, before reading this book, everything I knew about Kazakhstan might comfortably have fit on the back of a stamp!). Sadly, I found that his plot became far too convoluted, and sinuous to the point of impenetrability. That might, of course, merely be a judgement on my own intellectual faculties, but as each new plot tangent arose, I found myself becoming increasingly punch drunk. ( )