Empire State
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Henry Porter |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Orion |
| Honors | |
| The head of the US National Security Agency is assassinated in a spectacular set piece killing at Heathrow…An airport employee and his family are found murdered in their council house in Uxbridge…In New York, a fashionable Upper East Side osteopath receives two postcards showing the Empire State Building…A group of migrant workers are brutally gunned down in Macedonia…The quest to find the link between these apparently random events is pursued by Robert Harland—drawn back to a world he thought he’d left behind with a dual role for the UN and MI6. | |
The head of the US National Security Agency is assassinated in a spectacular set piece killing at Heathrow…An airport employee and his family are found murdered in their council house in Uxbridge…In New York, a fashionable Upper East Side osteopath receives two postcards showing the Empire State Building…A group of migrant workers are brutally gunned down in Macedonia…The quest to find the link between these apparently random events is pursued by Robert Harland—drawn back to a world he thought he’d left behind with a dual role for the UN and MI6.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
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 Kaveney
