Oliver Harris is the critically-acclaimed author of the Nick Belsey series of London crime novels. His next novel is A Shadow Intelligence, the first in a new espionage thriller series starring Elliot Kane. I’m really looking forward to reading this one. Here’s the synopsis:
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…
A Shadow Intelligence is due to be published in the UK by Little, Brown, in May 2019.
Described as an “action-packed sci-fi caper” starring an “interstellar repo man and professional finder”, this debut space opera looks like a lot of fun! Suzanne Palmer‘s Finder (maybe the first in a series?) is due to be published by 
An interesting account of a Republican’s departure from his life-long political home
Next year, Black Library are going to kick off their range of horror fiction, and I for one can’t wait! It looks like the series is going to include re-issues of Kim Newman’s 
I must confess that the cover is really what attracted me to this book. Of course, reading the synopsis added to my interest, but I’m pretty sure I first learned of this novel when the cover was unveiled. Nevertheless, I think Dan Moren‘s The Bayern Agenda looks really interesting, and like a rather intriguing mixture of spy and sci-fi fiction (“Traitor, Pilot, Banker, Spy”):
That just might be the most dazzling cover I’ve seen in a while: it’s bright, attention-grabbing and just a little bit blinding… While I haven’t read as much of Kameron Hurley‘s work as I would like, I have enjoyed everything that’s crossed my path so far (I would especially recommend the Bel Dame series). I think The Light Brigade is a stand-alone novel, and it sounds pretty cool:
Well, that cover is rather fantastic. I’d spotted the synopsis for this novel a short while before the cover was unveiled, and my interest has only grown with that gorgeous cover. I know, “don’t judge a book by its cover” — I’m not, really, as I’m already a big fan of Richard Kadrey‘s novels, and have routinely recommended and cheered each and every new novel he’s written and had published. (Shamefully, that hasn’t stopped me from falling behind…) The Grand Dark is “a lush, dark, stand-alone fantasy… a subversive tale that immerses us in a world where the extremes of bleakness and beauty exist together in dangerous harmony in a city on the edge of civility and chaos.” That sounds pretty intriguing! It has also been described as akin to the work of China Miéville and M. John Harrison. Here’s the full synopsis:
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Jacey Bedford?
Civilian Reader 