THE ENIGMA GIRL

Sidelined by MI5 for her violent tendencies—never mind that she was being sexually assaulted when she crowned her assailant with a champagne bottle—Agent Slim Parsons is summoned back to investigate a shadowy news site.

For months, Slim has been in hiding from her vengeance-seeking would-be rapist, billionaire money launderer Ivan Guest, whom she was secretly investigating. Her new job is to pose as a reporter at Middle Kingdom, an upstart news organization located north of London near historic Bletchley Park, that’s suspected of hacking top-security government systems for its big stories. With her brother missing, possibly killed by Guest, and her mother recovering from a home invasion attack, Slim is as loathe to play by the rules of journalism as of MI5. She defies her hard-nosed but New Agey boss Abigail Exton-White in pursuing unassigned stories, including a slave labor conspiracy with possible connections to Guest (the book has no lack of subplots for her to bounce among). Surprisingly adept at handling bad guys, she arouses suspicions among the journalists. Who is she really? The novel turns on connections between Middle Kingdom and AI-equipped descendants of Bletchley Park’s wartime codebreakers. There will be blood as Guest remakes Slim’s acquaintance and corrupt government forces seek to shut down Middle Kingdom. As the great-granddaughter of a Jewish-born Polish intelligence officer who heroically destroyed evidence that Poland had broken the Enigma machine when Germany invaded his country, Slim has a vested interest in the drama. Journalist Porter has been compared to Mick Herron, among other top spy novelists, and Slim could have leaped from one of his Slough House novels with her freewheeling rejection of authority. But Porter never loses sight of her humanity and basic vulnerability; the reader feels her personal losses while rooting for her to overcome them.

Journalism and spycraft make for compelling bedfellows in Porter’s latest thriller.