A Secret About a Secret by Peter Spiegelman

 

This was an altogether more satisfying book than last night's--not flawless, but better. The setting is ... strange: It's like some Nordic or Euro state (supported by the names of people and places) with some strange politics and a deeply structured and internally competitive security apparatus that's almost Soviet, with its competing security services and its service that the mere mention of the name turns people into pliable citizens (it's not fair to call them cowards when they're acting in the face of that kind of power discrepancy). The story is a relatively straightforward murder mystery at its heart--there's a lot of set-dressing about a biolab in an old boarding school, and corporate espionage and headhunting, and some things that could be interesting, or at least thought-provoking, about marriages and other intimate relationships. The characters are mostly interesting, the POV wearily determined. The prose manages to come across as like an authorial version of the old Transatlantic accent, managing to be neither Brit nor American but still readable and kinda interesting--if still kinda weird.