Do you know what the tech giants are doing with your data? Do you read the fine print in the agreement you make with Google when it updates its privacy notice or with Apple when you buy a new iPhone? Or, like me, do you just click "Agree" and move on quickly to whatever you need to do?
Because, what's the worst that can happen? Amazon sends you recommendations for books that are similar to A Cursed Place because you bought Peter Hanington's superb journalistic spy thriller... that's not so bad, not so dangerous. Right?
The truth, however, is that we don't really know what they're doing with their data. We're not completely sure whether we can trust them, but we like the convenience of having our songs, our location and our health data all in one easily accessible place. Accessible to us... and to our service provider. And so, even if the evidence suggests that bad actors might have used the insights that this data provide to influence the Brexit vote, or Trump's election victory or to track down political dissidents, we still seem content to make the trade.
A Cursed Place is built around this very contemporary issue, and it addresses it in the most breath-taking thriller of 2021. And this is what makes Hanington's novels - now a trilogy featuring old school radio hack William Carver - so compelling. He combines important, current themes that are sensitively and intelligently handled with pulsating plots and credible, enjoyable characters.
At the heart of this story is Public Square, a Google-esque Silicon Valley tech giant with a charismatic husband-and-wife leadership team. A slightly unusual conglomerate, Public Square has interest in hardware, software, data and mining the metals that power the tech revolution. The story, set in 2014, is broadly split between California, Chile, where they mine copper, London, where Carver has laid down his microphone and is teaching journalism and a Hong Kong that is in the midst of student protests against China, a story being covered by Patrick, Carver's former Radio 4 producer.
Hangingon's novels occupy a space most readily associated with the great John Le Carré: a world in which all the action takes place in the shadows. But where once those shadows were to be found in the dark, spook-inhabited streets of Helsinki or Vienna, in A Cursed Place they are behind firewalls, in virtual private networks and even in plain sight in Cupertino board rooms.
And instead of Smiley or Jackson Lamb, we have Carver, a proper journalist: irascible, incorruptible and steadfast in his determination to use his platform to hold power to account - 'an analogue man in a digital world' and perhaps A Dying Breed according to the title of the first book in the series.
It is a story brilliantly told, the disparate strands pulled together with pace and menace. The last 10 or so (relatively short) chapters delivered so much tension I barely remembered to breathe. But A Cursed Place never loses its sense of purpose, persistently asking whether we really should be comfortable surrendering so much ourselves to technology companies who may not always have our best interests at heart.
- As ever, I recommend addressing a series in the order it was written. A Cursed Place would stand alone as a wonderfully enjoyable novel but most readers will get much more out of it if they first read A Dying Breed and A Single Source (which I finished two weeks ago and is equally breath-taking).