Oliver Harris (2) (1978–)

Suspended MI6 officer Elliot Kane is teaching poetry at a university when he’s asked to go to remote Ascension Island to investigate a colleague’s apparent suicide about the same time a teenage girl has gone missing. Posing as a history professor conducting research he quickly gets into trouble and starts finding out how the death and disappearance may be connected with classified operations on the island. Then another teenager goes missing and Kane becomes a suspect, and the story real gets moving.

Oliver Harris writes a great high-tech espionage novel with a superb plot. This is the second one featuring Elliot Kane.… (altro)

Currently suspended detective Nick Belsey bluffs his way through the upper echelons of London celebrity culture to solve a disappearance turned stalking turned murder turned who knows what. He uses ruses, tricks, lies and simply lets people draw their own wrong conclusions to gain access to people and places forbidden to him, and most others. These are all skills he developed as an effective, and supposedly corrupt police officer. “Every corner of London seemed to hold associations these days, streets overlaid with scar tissue.” But the career seems to be almost over.

Belsey works his way into inner circles and solves several crimes to uncover the true reason behind all the questions. Oliver Harris is a truly skilled writer. I’ll be looking for the other books in the series.… (altro)

"Here was that law of nature that gathers up the indiscretions you've left behind and strews them in front of you."

This is the second in the Nick Belsen detective series. I read the first Hollow Man a few years ago, and really liked it. This one, not so much.

Nick Belsen is an amoral, extremely unprincipled, even corrupt London detective. He seems to get away with a lot, although he also always seems on the verge of getting caught, and is definitely on the edge financially.

In this entry, Nick discovers a series of what appear to be bomb shelters or government facilities in underground London, left over after WW II and apparently abandoned. He finds certain goods in some of them, and begins to surmise they may be in use for some sort of criminal enterprise. He decides to bring a date, a woman he barely knows, down to one of the shelters for some champagne and who knows what else. They've barely begun to sip their champagne when Nick turns around, and when he turns back his date has disappeared. Frantically searching the tunnels he's unable to find her. He's afraid to report her as missing because if something has happened to her, he fears being blamed.

I think there's a good story here, but it became more and more convoluted as more and more tunnels, facilities and locations were discovered. I had a hard time keeping track geographically of where we were in London and how things connected. The criminal enterprise(s) didn't always make sense to me either. A person more familiar with the underground facilities described (at least some of them are real), might enjoy this more than I did.

2 stars… (altro)