A Shadow Intelligence, Oliver Harris
A Shadow Intelligence, Oliver Harris
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A Shadow Intelligence

Author: Oliver Harris

Narrator: James Langton

Unabridged: 14 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: William Morrow

Published: 04/14/2020


Synopsis

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2020

“Thought-provoking...there’s certainly more than enough sharp writing and provocative content in this initial adventure to justify a sequel.”
—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—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 whom. And Kane’s not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.

About Oliver Harris

OLIVER HARRIS was born in London in 1978. He has an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in psychoanalysis. He writes occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sid on April 16, 2021

I thought A Shadow Intelligence was excellent. It is literate, exciting, very well researched and convincing. Elliot Kane is an agent for British Intelligence. He is something of a superman, in that he speaks lots of arcane languages well enough to recognise regional dialects, has all sorts of techni......more

Goodreads review by Hermione on January 15, 2019

Extremely pacy, edge of your seat in places and satisfyingly deep at the same time. So much insight into the scary world of espionage and state manipulation.......more

Goodreads review by Malavika on January 18, 2021

I liked parts of this book and felt it had real potential to be a page-turner, but the plot gets too bogged down with details. It’s hard to tell what’s important to commit to memory and what isn’t. There are far too many secondary characters who contribute nothing but exposition. I have it three sta......more

Goodreads review by Jacob on May 15, 2024

Disappointed by this ngl. Without the interesting setting of Kazakhstan, which was extremely well-researched and kept my interest throughout, this plot is overly complex without leaving enough hints for the reader to grasp what is going on. I felt that I had to finish it to find out what happened to......more

Goodreads review by Sam on March 02, 2021

I chose to read this book because it was clear from the reviews that I had read ahead of time that this was a particularly intelligently written spy novel. I wanted something that was well written and would give me a perspective on the genre that I might find refreshing. Well, I can't say that the b......more