The Silver Fish by Connor Martin Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: espionage, mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 384
Published by Mysterious Press on April 7, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In this thrilling espionage fiction debut, an American journalist in Ghana is pulled into a dangerous struggle for control of the world’s fiber optic cables.
Journalist Danielle “Dani” Moreau has spent a lifetime trying to outrun the privilege she was born into. Fresh off a personal tragedy, she lands in Ghana to uncover corruption in the local oil industry. But when she crosses paths with James Aidoo, an idealistic young Ghanaian whose father is a local populist politician, Dani remembers what drew her to journalism in the first you go looking for a story, but when the real story appears, it’s never the one you expected.
Dani soon finds herself chasing a scoop that involves an American operative with a violent past, a Ghanaian double agent, and a fight between the United States and China over one of the world’s most dangerous and least-known fiber optic cables. Underwater tubes as thick as a garden hose, the cables snake along the seafloor carrying the world’s information at the speed of light from one continent to another, and the fight to control them is increasingly visible on the world’s front pages. Amidst this world-changing struggle, Dani and her new associates will be forced to make deadly choices that impact each other and their own lives in ways nobody expects.
A twisty double-cross narrative, The Silver Fish opens with a spy operation going horrifically off course and takes the reader sprinting through crowded markets, darkened bars, bustling ports, and steaming jungle on the way to a startling conclusion. It will leave the reader shocked, moved, better-informed—and eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the story.
My Review:
“The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil.” Which is where this story begins. Because that quote may be from World War II, but journalist Danielle Moreau has come to Ghana in the here and now chasing a story with that same idea in mind. Not that bit about the righteousness in Heaven, but the part about Earth and oil.
She thinks she’s got the story of a lifetime by the tail – and she does. But the story she thinks she has is a story about Ghana selling its natural resources – particularly oil – to global powers both East and West, and the inevitable consequences that result from the influx of all that money combined with the universal forces of greed and corruption.
She’s right and wrong because she’s chasing the wrong target. Instead, she’s in pursuit of a larger consequence than she imagined. Because the story isn’t about oil. It’s about the literal underground and undersea war over who controls the pipelines, not for oil, but for data.
A hidden conflict between China and the United States over which country controls the means of moving data around the world, and which country has the upper hand in seeing, analyzing, and throttling all the secrets that their friends and enemies might be attempting to hide.
A conflict whose buried front lines come up for air – and connectivity – in Ghana.
Dani is trying to outrun her past by immersing herself in her old career and one country’s old and new problems. She gets herself caught in the crossfire between two superpowers, their desperate agents, and a plot to change the balance of power in a world that has not quite yet become the future.
But it will. One way or another. No matter which side Dani decides will let her run further and faster – from herself.
Escape Rating A: I picked this up in spite of the fact that thrillers are not my usual jam. I was intrigued because this is, on the one hand, the kind of thriller that isn’t done much anymore. Espionage used to be one of the genre’s backbones, back when the old Cold War was hot under the official ice of post-war peace.
On the other hand, it takes place somewhere that is not any of the usual suspects, and is wrapped up in issues that didn’t even exist during the Cold War. And yet, in another way it’s as old as the hills. After all, spying is commonly referred to as the world’s second-oldest profession. And sometimes the distance between it and the first is barely a hair’s breadth.
What made this story so fascinating isn’t actually Dani, although she’s the character we follow most consistently and with the most certainty. Which makes sense, because everyone else fits somewhere into the spy games between China and the U.S. while Dani is just herself. Even if she’s not quite certain who that self is anymore and whether she wants to reclaim her old self or invent a new one.
The part of the story that provides the thrills and the chills and the dangers and especially the twist at the end is the story that Dani inserts herself into – even if neither she nor the reader are aware of it at first.
At first, as Dani works out in the open – or at least thinks she does – in pursuit of her story, there’s another story going on. Dani has inserted herself into the midst of a spy game that has just gone terribly wrong. Or at least terribly ragged. Both China and the U.S. have agents in Ghana and have co-opted Ghanaian officials and ordinary citizens to work for them for inducements that are never likely to be fulfilled.
And of course there are double agents playing both sides in the hopes of coming out on top no matter who wins. If anyone ever does.
All of the players, including Dani herself although she would be loath to even see it, let alone admit it, are all working from the age-old playbook of colonization, colonialism and conflict, where the great powers always win and the pawns always get sacrificed.
Which is what keeps the reader invested from beginning to end. Because we already, sorta/kinda, in a big picture sense know how the big story is going to go – or at least keep on going because the players change, but the game of empires keeps right on rolling along. But that knowledge doesn’t stop the reader from hoping that one, or more, of the tempting silver fish swimming through this sea of misplaced loyalties and corrupted data have a chance to swim free.
Even if freedom is still just another word for having nothing left to lose.
