A Shadow Intelligence

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What to expect

'Oliver Harris is always pure quality and I'm loving the hell out of his foray into the contemporary spy novel' Ian Rankin


The intelligence service puts two years and over £100k into the training of new field officers. You're shown how to steal cars, strip weapons, hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of blackmail and improvised explosives, two workshops solely dedicated to navigating by the stars. But nothing about what I had heard one old spy call whiplash. No one tells you how to go home.

There is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane - mercurial, inquisitive, free floating. He's spent fifteen years managing events overseas that never make the papers, deniable and deeply effective. Kane is a ghost in his own life, picking up and dropping personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when a woman he loves, Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is forced centre stage.

Drawn ever deeper into a realm of deception, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to steering them. He's used to a new mode of hybrid psychological warfare - but snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges. Poised between China, Russia and the West, dictatorship and democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of private agencies, it's impossible to work out who is manipulating who. And Kane's not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.

Unable to trust anyone, hunted by his own colleagues, and with the life of someone he loves at stake, Kane needs to work out who is driving events, and why...

Critics Review

  • Elliot Kane needs his wits about him to keep track of his own identities and those of fellow MI6 agent Joanna, who he’s looking for in Kazakhstan. The binary simplicity of the Cold War has been replaced by a geopolitical Rubik’s cube of corruption, nationalism, oil money and internet deceit. Tremendous evocation of modern Kazakhstan and the contemporary intelligence landscape. Scary if true, or even half true.

    Sunday Times Crime Club, star pick

  • Sharp writing and provocative content

    Wall Street Journal

  • Elliott Kane is an unusually thoughtful spy… As much a thinker as a doer, Kane has much in common with le Carré’s Jerry Westerby or Lionel Davidson’s Johnny Porter, a plausibly multi-faceted old school operator with the skills – physical, psychological, intellectual – to negotiate the geopolitical faultlines of central Asia as Russia and China square up over Kazahstan’s untapped oil reserve

    Irish Times

  • A Middle East specialist, flies to Astana in Kazakhstan to search for his former colleague and lover Joanna, and gets caught up in the jostling for power, deals and intelligence in a city portrayed as becoming a 21st-century mecca for spooks . . . Classier writing, fresher characters, original setting, a real sense of insider lore (on both spycraft and geopolitics)

    Sunday Times

  • A splendid thriller with new perspectives on places and the distinctly unclean side of the great game of espionage

    Crime Time (Blog)

  • A masterful entry into spy fiction. This may be the deepest a contemporary spy novel has penetrated the cold new world of dark web intelligence…An absorbing, superbly written novel likely to stand as one of the best spy novels of the year

    Kirkus Starred Review

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