Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”
The ‘most remote Island in the world’, but also one of the most strategically important to the Western Alliance as this is where the transatlantic cables were laid from and where the new fibre-optic cables also come ashore. The temptation to intercept them is too strong for western intelligence agencies such as GCHQ to resist.
Cue problems with this operation in the death by apparent suicide of the MI6 tech guy on station. He has had a chequered history in particular in the Middle-East where he had to be sprung from jail for paying for two teens to have sex while he watched. On Ascension, co-incident with his suicide a 15 year old girl has gone missing and the brown stuff has hit the fan.
So much so, that a ‘disgraced’ former MI6 operative Elliot Kane (first encountered in A Shadow Intelligence) is brought out of his, now comfortable, existence as a lecturer in an Oxford college with the promise that if he helps out, all his troubles will be forgotten.
Off he toddles to Ascension Island under the guise of academic research into former colonial / imperial island populations and is immediately in trouble when he finds a teenage boy being set-upon by three older men. Intervening may not be conducive to his mission but he does so anyway and finds that the boy was a close friend of the vanished girl.
From here, he continues his probing, and find that the hot water he is in, getting deeper and hotter, culminating in the imminent threat of conflict both with the Chinese and the Russians. This he must pre-empt, the solution lying with solving the riddle of the missing girl.
I had read Oliver Harris’ three crime novels with its protagonist being a police officer perpetually in trouble and was prepared for an entertaining read. What I got was a very well crafted spy-thriller where the looming presence of the volcanic island is as threatening as its human inhabitants. Its history and ecology also play a huge part as does a back-story where the space-race is about to get globally significant with huge potential for international conflict, corrupt politicians and multi-national companies focussed on power money and influence.
The waters are well and truly muddied, with apparently disparate plot strands being woven together to create a coherent whole, where global issues and individual family tragedies overlap. No-one really wins, apart, it seems, from the MI6 agent-handler whose career goes from zero to hero in a very short space of time. A cracking read!
