Empire State Book

With Empire State Henry Porter continues his reinvention of the traditional British spy thriller. This is, in places, in the tradition of Buchan--high adventure in exotic places--and yet entirely lacks the sexism and racism of Buchan at his worst; Le Carre is an important influence, but the scepticism about British policy, let alone American, is even more radically sceptical than Le Carre at his most cynical. The death of a presidential adviser, the murder of an airport worker at Heathrow and the mass killing of a band of immigrant workers trying to cross into Macedonia all prove part of the same complex intrigue. Harland, who dominated Porter's A Spy's Life gets involved less because of his prowess than because his back injuries have led him to a fashionable osteopath who proves complexly important. In London, canny intelligence woman Isis deals with office intrigue, and with such technicalities as DNA samples from the insides of computer keyboards before haring off to islands in the Nile. What Porter is best at, and what we effectively get here, is just this--that sense of hard, clever legwork followed by bursts of violent action and desperate revelations. --Roz KaveneyRead More