A Shadow Intelligence
an utterly unputdownable spy thriller
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3 Months Free + £10 Audible voucher
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A Shadow Intelligence
Narrated by:
Richard Coyle
Buy Now for £14.35
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Narrated by:
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Richard Coyle
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By:
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Oliver Harris
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...©2019 Oliver Harris
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Critic reviews
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 The binary simplicity of the Cold War has been replaced by a geopolitical Rubik's cube of corruption, nationalism, oil money and internet deceit.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.
Sharp writing and provocative content
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
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)
A splendid thriller with new perspectives on places and the distinctly unclean side of the great game of espionage
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
A gripping, fast-moving and intelligent novel from new spy fiction star Oliver Harris which will leave readers wanting a lot more Elliot Kane adventures
Elliot Kane is highly-trained MI6 spook. So highly-trained that he's pretty much forgotten who the hell he really is after years of false identities and subterfuge...In a deadly world of deception by just about every nasty state, and that includes his own, he's truly up against it in this complex thriller that keeps you on your toes throughout
An intelligent and thoroughly researched spy-procedural giving razor-sharp insight into the particular challenges of 21st-century espionage
A twisting spiral of lies and corruption, a pitch-perfect portrait of contemporary London and a beguiling bastard of a hero
Sososo nearly a tremendous mega read but too complex with characters not quite memorable enough when they cropped up later on. Perhaps with the wonderful political, geographical and personal information in it, a trio of books might have been written, or perhaps my memory isn’t very good.
Incredible
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New discovery.
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Excellent listen
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awesome audio book
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Highly recommended. The reader (PUBLISHERS TAKE NOTE) is superb. His pace and understanding of the content is measured and well delivered. So many publishers seem to pick random people from ‘voice talent’ websites. Coyle is the real deal
Outstanding
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