The Whispering Dead
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The past comes back to haunt MI6 secret agent Cordelia Hemlock in this spy thriller from Sunday Times bestselling author David Mark – “Top-level espionage fiction” (Booklist Starred Review)
Cordelia Hemlock is teetering on the verge of joining MI6 when she meets the enigmatic Walt, a high-ranking member of the Secret Intelligence Service, who tells her: They won’t want you to do well. They won’t ever trust you. They don’t trust me and I’m one of them. She takes this as a challenge rather than a warning. She wants to protect the nation. Serve Queen and country. Who would turn down such a glorious opportunity?
Fourteen years later, Cordelia is desk-bound after finishing an undercover operation and going quietly mad with boredom. So when the call comes through on the top-secret Pandora line – so-called after the locked-box the telephone is kept in – she answers it.
It’s Walt. No longer officially MI6, he still inhabits the murky world of intelligence, where information always comes with a price. He tells her he has a secret to share with her – and only her. And once she knows it, nothing will ever be the same again . . .
A follow-up to the critically acclaimed psychological thriller The Mausoleum, this is a twisty, page-turning tale of friendship and divided loyalties set against the dark, forbidding landscape of the rural Borderlands.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mark's dense sequel to 2019's The Mausoleum opens in 1968, when Cordelia Hemlock, then a young, idealistic, but unsure recruit, is interviewed by SIS agent Walt Renwick for a position with MI6. Flash forward to 2016, the year journalist Paolo Fergus publishes an investigative piece on a 1983 conspiracy involving the death of a British intelligence agent given up to Guatemalan special forces in an effort "to avoid causing embarrassment to President Reagan" and to serve American and British interests in South America. This story prompts Cordelia to relate to Paulo events of 1982 that involve connecting the political stabilizing of Belize, a former British colony bordering Guatemala, with the controversial program to which Cordelia was assigned. Unbeknownst to her, she was marked by her superiors as "high risk" and "potentially subversive," putting her, Walt, and the clandestine program at risk. Mack does a good job portraying the personal sacrifices public servants make, but at times the risks his characters are up against are unclear, especially as he requires the reader to connect many of the dots—both characters' relationships and historical events—on their own. Espionage fans will have fun trying to separate fact from fiction.
