His historical novels include the Nick Revill series, set in Elizabethan London, a Victorian sequence, and a series of Chaucer mysteries, now in in e-books.
In a northern English city four jihadists are on their way to the central railway station. It’s a practice run for a suicide attack. The police and intelligence services are surveilling the terrorists, one of whom has apparently been turned by the Americans and now reports back to MI5. But the practice run is disastrously real after all. There are 63 deaths and many injured.
A public inquiry follows. The pressure of it is felt most acutely by Jake Winter, the intelligence officer who ran the informant. He feels responsible, even guilty, and suspects that his superiors are only too willing to palm off the blame.
This is the set-up for Nicholas Searle’s engrossing and subtle thriller, A Fatal Game. Searle worked in Intelligence before becoming a writer so the book possesses a quiet authority. He shows how a key requirement for agents is that they develop a ‘bond’ with their informants. But while the agent befriends, reassures and manipulates there’s always the chance that he is the one being played.
Jake Winter has an unconventional background, with an English mother and a Maori father. This makes him a bit of an outsider, as is his fellow case-officer Leila, a British Muslim. After the bomb attack at the station, Jake and Leila are handling another informant, the British-born Rashid.
There’s to be a new outrage, he says, a suicide mission at football match. While Jake and Leila and their sceptical superiors try to work out how far they can trust Rashid, the simultaneous public inquiry shines an unwelcome light on the ambiguities of the secret world. In particular, there’s a very narrow path to be walked between ensuring public safety on the one hand and getting enough evidence for a conviction, on the other. The bomber has to be caught in the act, or rather just before it. The decision to step in and make a ‘hard stop’is fraught with danger.
A Fatal Game isn’t a long novel but it has space for office politics, in the style of le Carré, as well as deft portraits of one of the (Muslim) families affected by the station massacre. There’s an interesting and unflattering sidelight on the relationship between US and British Intelligence. Altogether the multiple viewpoints and topical subject make for a thoughtful read, unsensational but gripping.
