Oliver Harris: The Shame Archive [2024]

'Here's a novel to make the great and the good quake.... Harris writes with compassion or satirical glee, depending on which his characters deserve, and this third Kane novel puts him firmly in the Mick Herron class' Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

'Captivating and horrifying... Oliver Harris is squarely in the territory of the greats: Greene and le Carre but also the modern masters, Mick Herron and Adam Brookes. There can be no higher accolade' Manda Scott

How does a secret service confront its past, when secrets are kept for ever?

Buried deep in MI6's digital archives is the most classified directory of all. It doesn't contain war plans or agent profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians, royalty, business leaders and the service's own personnel.

There are seven decades' worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of assessing risk, sometimes as a guard against betrayal, often engineered by MI6 for their own purposes. These amount to the most sensitive two thousand terabytes of data in the Service's possession. When material from the archive begins appearing online, the panic is widespread.

At first, the security breach only manifests itself in apparently random events: a suicide, a disappearance, a breakdown. But when it turns out that the individuals concerned were all contacted by the same anonymous person, a connection comes into focus. The archive has somehow leaked. The hunt is now of unprecedented urgency. That's when they call for Elliot Kane...