Night Heron
*Starred Review* In 1989, Li Huasheng (code name Peanut) was a promising Beijing engineer and the ringleader of a group of would-be defectors trading China’s technology secrets to the UK. But their operation aborted when Peanut was imprisoned in a labor camp after impulsively attacking a soldier during the Tiananmen Square protests. Two decades later, Peanut returns to Beijing, desperate to renew the deal with UK intelligence that he’s kept secret all these years. Peanut mistakes British journalist Philip Mangan for an undercover operative and approaches him with top-secret information he’s strong-armed from a member of his former ring who has since risen in the party. Mangan manages to get the “proof” documents to the embassy, and he’s immediately drafted into the world of espionage. But their secret world isn’t as impenetrable as one would think, and the operation is threatened by a technology-hunting corporate intelligence team and leaks from American intelligence to the Chinese government. Brookes, a former BBC China correspondent, offers a tension-laden portal to modern China, contrasting Mangan’s foreign perspective with Peanut’s experiences to illustrate the impact of party politics on Chinese citizens. Night Heron is a fascinating portrait of the dangerous complexities of spying in a restricted country, the competing agendas driving international intelligence, and China’s startlingly varied social realities. A must-read for fans of espionage and smart global fiction in general. --Christine Tran