The Istanbul Signal

She was one of the strongest swimmers her country had ever produced. She was found face-down in the Bosphorus three weeks before she was scheduled to switch on the most secure communications network the Western alliance had built in fifty years.

The Istanbul police wrote drowning. Marcus Vane, eleven weeks dry in a small flat in Lisbon when the call came, knows better.

Dr. Elif Sahin left sixty-eight pages on a whiteboard nobody was supposed to read - a hidden architecture inside the network she helped build, designed to fail at a single coordinated trigger. Someone has been waiting fifteen years to pull it. Someone inside the building Marcus works in has been making sure nobody else got close.

From the back streets of Karakoy to a quiet Cotswolds garden, from a Mossad contact in Vienna to a video link with a man who built the entire architecture from inside, Marcus Vane follows a thread that connects three closed investigations to one program that has been running the whole time.

The Istanbul Signal is the third novel in the Marcus Vane series. Patient, exact, and built on the small specific texture of a life - the wrist scar from Tunis 2012, the tinnitus from Sangin 2008, the eighteen weeks without a drink - it is a literary spy thriller in the tradition of le Carré and Mick Herron, for readers who want their espionage written like it matters.