THE SILVER FISH

THE SILVER FISH by Connor Martin is a twisty, morally complex thriller where the heroes aren't sure they're heroes and you can't help but feel for the villains. The story is at once a fast-paced adventure hooking you from the first page with murders and double-crosses while also a meditation on identity, loyalty, and whether one person can ever really trust another. The plot reveals the dark underside of global technology, politics, and U.S.-China competition (informed by the author's first-hand expertise). For readers of elevated, authoritative thrillers like John Le Carre, Lauren Wilkinson, and Nelson DeMille, THE SILVER FISH will inform and provoke, even as it entertains.

After an attempt at domesticity ends in tragedy and the dissolution of her marriage, Dani Moreau is trying to recapture the brazen spirit of her old self; a young journalist who dove headlong into dangerous areas with little regard for her safety and a relentless drive for the truth. She finds herself in Ghana, hunting a story about China's investment in the region's oil. But when she meets James Aidoo, an American-educated computer scientist and son of a populist politician with links to China, Dani realizes that the real story is not oil but another precious resource being pulled from Ghana's ground: data. She gets a front row seat to the modern-day battles between the U.S. and China, fought by lonely soldiers and unlikely spies, on battlefields both real and virtual, well outside their respective borders. Before long, Dani finds herself crossing lines she never imagined, pulled along by a genuine desire to help and a dose of her own bad judgement. Along the way, the reader meets shadowy characters, including a CIA officer with a simmering violent streak, and The Double, a man of divided loyalties, whose increasing desperation might get all of them killed. Connor Martin is an American author and foreign policy expert. Born in London and raised in New York, Martin holds degrees from Princeton and Columbia and is currently serving in the U.S. government in the Department of the Treasury. He previously worked at Coinbase, the Department of Justice, and Gerson Lehrman Group, and has published on technology and foreign policy in Project Syndicate and elsewhere. This novel was written before he began government service and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government or Treasury.