The Silver Fish

 The Silver Fish by Connor Martin is an espionage story that mostly place in West Africa, mostly in Ghana. It caught my interest based on the location. I’ve not often seen a thriller novel based in West Africa. I was in both Senegal and the Ivory Coast several decades ago, and my daughter just returned from a work project in Ghana. I remember eagerly listening to a professor who had moved to a remote area of Nigeria in the 1930’s. I hoped that this novel would live up to the spellbinding experience I felt in those lectures. Unfortunately, the quality and vitality of the story simply didn’t measure up to my expectation. The book opened in Ghana with the assassination of a Nigerian telecommunications executive, and then quickly turned to the efforts by both China and the United States to have controlling interest in Ghana’s local politics.

Primarily, this novel was based on the location of Ghana being where undersea high speed telecommunication cables came together. Thus, whatever information the United States was sending overseas would have to pass through these fiber optic cables. The Chinese were trying to tap into the cables in order to know what the U.S. was doing, and the U.S. was trying to keep them from doing so. Various spies, including double agents were involved in this effort, and large bribes were being paid to local politicians as well as operators of these systems. A journalist was trying to get information about this high profit enterprise for the story of her lifetime. 

Although I did finish the book, I never got particularly interested in the outcome for the protagonist, Danielle Moreau. While James Aidoo, a young male Ghanian was sometimes interesting, his presence had an uncertain importance as he interacted with both Chinese and American agents. So, as the book wore on, it just never led me to be excited about the material. I can’t give a favorable recommendation for this novel.