4 stars
First Sentence: You asked to be kept informed about this most sensitive of matters.
Thoughts: Folks, we have found a successor to John Le Carré.
August Drummond has just been fired from British Intelligence for leaking secrets—minor ones, but still. Oh, and he also punched a guy in the face at his disciplinary hearing for mentioning the name of his wife, Martha, who had been killed a few months before in a hit-and-run while out riding her bike. So he’s going to Istanbul to take a job with an IT start-up doing he doesn’t care what.
On the plane he drinks from his own private stash and tries to ignore his chatty seatmate. He notices a man a few rows ahead who’s acting oddly. Drummond’s spy instincts are aroused. Everything this man is doing tells him that he is Up To Something Shady. He follows the man after they land. First the man goes into the restroom, then he comes out, then he’s arrested by the Turkish police. Drummond goes into the rest room and finds a book the man had hidden in the trash can. He flips through the book and finds where the man had pencilled in directions for a meeting that night. Drummond follows the directions to a cemetery where he meets another mysterious man who thinks he’s his new recruit for the Islamic State terrorist group.
Drummond, being bored and more than a little drunk, decides to go along with it. Who knows, maybe he’ll get some information that will help him get back into the good graces of British Intelligence. In the meantime he goes to his new job at the start-up, which has all the earmarks of a fly-by-night operation despite the owner’s loud protests to the contrary. It’s not fly-by-night enough for her to want to hire Youssef, a young Syrian man whose big mouth and Playboy Bunny tie get him into trouble he’s not aware of.
Then, while Drummond and Youssef are having a smoke on the roof of the office building, who should show up but Lawrence, Drummond’s arch-enemy, aka the man he punched at the disciplinary hearing. What’s he doing here?
When Drummond’s not drinking himself unconscious or pretending to work, he’s carrying out instructions from his recruiter. He follows an Iranian scientist around Istanbul, all the while ignoring the niggling feeling that something’s not quite right until it’s too late and he’s been zip-tied and thrown inside a broken refrigerator.
While Drummond figures out how he’s going to get himself out of the fridge, Lawrence is trying to secure his promotion in the intelligence service. Then Youssef, who is desperately trying to get to his family in Europe, returns and almost causes an international incident.
It takes a while for the story to get going, but once it does it’s a non-stop thrill ride to the end. Everyone has their own ulterior motives and most of them collide in varying shades of disaster. There is no easy way out of the situation they find themselves in, but isn’t that always the way once the intelligence services get involved?
The Eclectic Reviewer 