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. ( )

The real attraction here is the setting--the real life Ascension Island. Too much of the plot, unfortunately is info-dumped two or three times during the book, rather than revealed through investigation. The story would have been stronger if it had been treated more like a mystery than a thriller. But Ascension Island itself is fascinating. ( )

A solid 2nd chapter in the Elliot Kane Series. I liked the first 2/3 of the novel as the mystery of the murder on the island was compelling. Kane's arrival made it feel like a western when a stranger arrives to an old dusty town caught up in strife. The final 1/3 was more Moonraker than mystery, but it was still a good read overall. ( )

I was a bit hesitant about starting this novel. Unlike everyone else I know who had read it, I had struggled with Oliver Harris’s previous novel, A Shadow Intelligence, which introduced the character of Elliott Kane who is also the protagonist of Ascension. My concerns were misplaced, however, and I found this a gripping and entertaining novel.

Thea action all takes place on Ascension Island, a rocky outcrop in the South Atlantic. Its remote location lends a considerable military significance, and it has large American and British military bases. It is so remote that there are no direct flights to it – anyone wishing to visit has to travel first to St Helena (famous as the home in exile of Napoleon after the Battle of Waterloo), several hundred miles away, and then take a bumpy flight in a small plane.

Kane has left the Intelligence Service after the events chronicled in A Shadow Intelligence, but is lured back to participate in an ‘off-the-books’ operation to infiltrate the island to investigate the apparent suicide of a former colleague. In such a small, parochial community, a newcomer stands out anyway, and Kane’s wish not to attract attention is further stymied when, on his first night on the island, he has to intervene when he sees a group of adults attacking a teenaged boy. He discovers that feelings are running high on the island following the disappearance of a teenaged girl, known to have been close to the boy in question.

Meanwhile, against this backdrop, there are indications that a secret operation to tap a major telecommunications node which is being established on the island may have been compromised. It is fears over the integrity of this operation (so secret that it is known to only a very few of the highest ranked officers in the service) that prompted the Service to commission Kane to return to action.

Harris is very good at keeping the tension, with the action moving between Kane’s exploits on Ascension Island and his handler’s activities back home where she shuttles between GCHQ and Thames House. I also enjoyed the descriptions of the island itself. Obviously, I have no way of determining how accurate they are, but they convinced me, and I could almost feel the relentless gale blowing across the island. ( )