Everyone holds cards.Not everyone knows the dealer.The world is one of surveillance, intelligence networks, discreet meetings and people who rarely use their real names. But when Christina disappears into an operation stretching from London to Brussels, Monaco and Iceland, the rules begin to change.Somewhere inside the machinery of international intelligence, a system quietly assembles the pieces.Some are running out of places to hide. Others have resources, and their own reasons for helping.Choices are narrowing.Roberta offers the cards.CARD GAME is a novel of espionage, surveillance and shifting loyalties, where tarot cards mark the turns of a much larger game—and where the most important question may not be who is playing.But who is watching.Military Historian: There is a great deal going on in Ed Adams's Card Game.Russian gangsters, intelligence officers, private military contractors, corporate fixers, surveillance teams, oligarchs, and Colonel Charles “Chuck” Manners, the sort of man who seems to have spent much of his professional life arriving in difficult places shortly before they become considerably more difficult.At first glance, therefore, this looks like familiar thriller territory.It isn't.Adams understands that operations don't simply happen because an impressive man with a gun decides they should.Someone has to provide the intelligence. Someone has to move the money. Someone has to arrange transport, communications, accommodation and equipment. Somebody has to watch the target. Somebody else has to interpret what the watcher reports. And somewhere along the way somebody will misunderstand an instruction, make an assumption or produce a report that bears only a passing resemblance to what actually happened.ARC Reader Review: There is a pleasingly unfashionable confidence to Ed Adams's Card Game. It contains spies, oligarchs, Freemasons, private armies, mysterious consultancies, compromised corporations and enough surveillance equipment to furnish a small branch of GCHQ. It even divides proceedings with Tarot cards.In less careful hands this might require a corkboard and several kilometres of red string.Adams's trick is to make the conspiracy increasingly less conspiratorial.Everyone assumes there must be someone at the centre. Instead, Christina Nott and her associates encounter layers of subcontracting, temporary alliances and competing interests. Raven, Qube and Brant become less a chain of command than a corporate hall of mirrors. Even the Russians cannot conveniently be reduced to “the Russians.”This is conspiracy reconceived as management consultancy.The joke runs quietly throughout the novel. Terrifying organisations have administrative problems. Surveillance operations require wiring. Intelligence officers drink bad coffee.The accumulation is also part of the design.Card Game is interested in what happens when nobody possesses the whole picture—not the spies, not the criminals, not the corporations and, for much of the novel, not the reader.Its Tarot imagery therefore proves unexpectedly apt. The cards don't predict what will happen.They merely suggest that somebody has already dealt the hand.Review: I CAME HERE FOR HANDBAG ESPIONAGE.Okay.This book has Tarot cards, spies, Russians, Freemasons, oligarchs, mercenaries, surveillance equipment, disinformation, at least seventeen companies that may actually be three companies wearing hats, and a man called Chuck who apparently appears whenever geopolitics develops a rash.Fine.Whatever.CHRISTINA HAS A SUBMACHINE GUN IN A MULBERRY BAG.I feel this should have been mentioned on the cover.Anyway.Five stars. Read more
