AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2020

‚ÄúThought-provoking…there‚Äôs certainly more than enough¬†sharp writing and provocative content¬†in this initial adventure to justify a sequel.‚Äù
—Wall Street Journal

There is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane—volatile, inquisitive, free-floating—in the field. They take them and put two years and over £100k into their training, showing them how to steal cars, strip weapons, and hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of blackmail and improvised explosives, and entire workshops solely dedicated to navigating by the stars. But no one tells them how to go home.
 
Kane has spent fifteen years managing events overseas that never make the papers. He is a ghost in his own life, assuming and shedding personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when the woman he loves, another operative named Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is forced center stage in his own life.

Drawn ever deeper into a realm of deception and conflicting agendas, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to steering them. While he’s well-versed in modern psychological warfare, snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges‚Äîpoised between China, Russia, and the West, dictatorship and democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of private agencies, it‚Äôs impossible to work out who is manipulating whom. And Kane‚Äôs not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.

British spy Elliot Kane is forced out of semi-retirement to investigate a colleague’s suspicious death on Ascension Island, a remote and rocky outpost of the British military in the middle of the Atlantic.

Despite foiling a plot to incite a new world war, Elliot Kane has been on probation with MI6 since his rogue misadventures in Kazakhstan. Granted a job teaching literature to college students, he surprisingly enjoys a conventional life away from the intelligence services. Then a former colleague reaches out with a request: one of her tech specialists on a long-term, covert mission has killed himself, and the agency needs to find out why before proceeding with the vital operation. The carrot in this offer is helping his old friend; the stick is more disciplinary action if he doesn’t comply. So Kane takes on deep cover again and heads to one of the most remote places on the planet, Ascension Island.

A curious legacy of England’s imperial past, Ascension is a desolate rock made of dead volcanic cones located in the Atlantic Ocean halfway between Brazil and Angola. Only employees and their families are allowed to reside there, and the island contains both British and American military bases. After learning that a teenage girl disappeared on the same night as the technician’s suicide, Kane finds himself with two mysteries to solve. With local tensions running high, he needs to move quickly before suspicion falls on him. Kane soon realizes the island has more secrets than even the government knows, some leading straight to the highest offices in London.