Kent, that garden of England, seems an unlikely setting for a financial thriller, particularly one that opens with the discovery of a headless, handless body on a beach, “some soft, bloated sea creature”. But make it the bleak coastline at Dungeness, a “strange, cold, desolate place of shingle”, where the nuclear power station “sat squat… like a toad”, and it begins to feel adequately noir-ish.
The mutilated body turns out to be that of a banker, one who worked for the shadowy organisation of Higgs, an American investment bank, which British agents suspect was set up by the CIA to infiltrate terrorist financing. (They’re right: “Even the combined might of the United States’ most powerful security agencies had found it difficult to penetrate the byzantine world of high finance… Tracking weapons-grade plutonium they could do. Tracing hot money was far more difficult.” So they built Higgs Bank.)
Kate Pendragon is a money-laundering expert who’s been seconded to MI5. She’s sent to Dungeness to investigate the Higgs employee’s death, and finds herself uncovering terrifying details of a plot to rig the world’s financial markets and bring about global collapse. “MI5 always says that Britain is only three missed meals away from anarchy. Well, this scenario would reveal whether or not they’re correct.”
There’s lots going on in Toxic, the debut thriller from Observer journalist Jamie Doward. As well as the CIA boss of Higgs, panicking as the bank he constructed with the best of intentions teeters on the brink of disaster, and the global-market-collapse shenanigans, there’s also an Islamist terrorist cell plotting nuclear devastation. And the Bondishly named Kate Pendragon, brilliant, widowed and lonely, is discovering links and trying to stop it all while her spy bosses, in time-honoured tradition, refuse to believe her.
It’s all wonderfully tangled and enjoyably villainous; Doward clearly revels in the drama –melodrama, at times – of the situation he’s created. His terror cell-linked Saudi prince, bent on evil, at one point even strokes his beard, “then twisted the bristles on his chin into a sharp point, like a dagger”. This is a writer who loves his genre.
Pendragon is a more nuanced creation, and a pleasingly different sort of heroine, sleeping around indiscriminately in the wake of her husband’s death, running mile after mile to blot it all out, finding herself reluctantly drawn to the Kent detective DCI Sorrenson (“I’ve got Viking blood in me, although I’m Kent through and through”), who’s on the case of the murdered banker. She studies “dense and impenetrable” arrays of numbers and letters and digs to the bottom of the crimes. “People lie but money doesn’t. Intelligence agencies have known that for years. You study where people are moving their cash and you can read their minds.” She’s great.
Doward might slightly overdo the harshness of the Dungeness coastline – the power station is both “glowering at the sky, like a giant Easter Island statue”, and resembling “a decrepit spaceship that had landed millennia ago”. Meanwhile, on the beach, “petrified truths hunkered in the shingle like sea lice”; it’s Kent noir. But Toxic is in the main a novel bursting with exuberance, building up to a rip-roaring finale after laying waste to various evil henchmen and misguided agents.
Toxic is published by Constable & Robinson (£19.99). Click here to buy it for £15.99
