2024 SPY FICTION: THE ENIGMA GIRL by Henry Porter

2024 is finishing on a bit of a high note for spy fiction fans, with David Goodman’s impressive spy debut A Reluctant Spy, a new George Smiley novel (Karla’s Choice) by John le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway, David McCloskey’s The Seventh Floor, and now a new spy novel by Henry Porter, The Enigma Girl (Quercus, 7 November 2024).

This time around Porter has deserted his regular central character of recent novels, Paul Samson, for a new protagonist in the form of MI5 operative Slim Parsons. The book opens with Slim recovering from burnout and dealing with a raft of personal issues. Her last deep cover job for MI5 ended with a life-and-death struggle on a private jet that caused her to go on the run from both the deadly target and her angry bosses in the Security Service. They say that violence comes too easily to her and that she is potentially too unstable for the role of an MI5 operative. Despite this, Slim is recalled and asked to infiltrate a news website that is causing alarm in the highest circles. It is staffed by a group descended from wartime codebreakers operating from an unassuming office block near Bletchley Park, who seem to have dangerous access to government secrets.

The operation looks like a demotion, but Slim accepts it on the condition that the Security Service searches for her missing brother. The mission, however, turns out to be more complex than she expected. Soon Slim is having to deal with threats from her last mission, human traffickers, bosses who seem to be playing their own nefarious game and the pending death of her mother, who has her own secrets.

This is a first class spy thriller. Porter adroitly mixes the personal and the professional, and develops Slim into a character of real substance, who changes over the course of the book. The pacing is a little slow at times, but is helped along by several flashes of exciting violence and a deep sense of menace that permeates the book from the opening pages. Porter also ably conveys the bureaucratic wheeling and dealing that drives the book, and the dodgy nexus between the intelligence services, politics and the intrusion of corrupt business interests. Like Gerald Seymour, Porter is very good at unveiling the dirty intersection between intelligence work and organised crime, and how it impacts on security. There is also plenty of interesting information about Bletchley Park and intelligence operations during World War II and after.

Adding to the pleasure, the area around Bletchley Park is nicely evoked, including the canal on which Slim is living, and there is a good dose of fascinating archaeological detail.

On the negative side, the book is probably a bit too long and lacks the driving focal point that made Porter’s best novels, Firefly and White Hot Silence, so good. Instead of a single overarching mission around which other things develop, ie find the eponymous teenage refugee at the core of Firefly before he is killed, there is a mix of different subplots and dangers this time around, which take some time to come together. The ending, though, is very tense and delivers some good thrills. These concerns, however, are only minor and do not stop The Enigma Girl from being one of the best spy novels that I have read this year. It is also one that raises some important issues about secrecy and government accountability. Highly recommended.

The Enigma Girl is released in the United Kingdom and Australia on 7 and 12 November respectively and in the United States in January 2025.