“A twisting spiral of lies and corruption, a pitch-perfect portrait of contemporary London, and a beguiling bastard of a hero—what a recipe for a great read.” —Val McDermid, author of The Mermaids Singing
Describing London police detective Nick Belsey, hero of The Hollow Man, an enthrallingly original thriller from British crime novelist Oliver Harris—the Daily Mail declared, “He’s got to be London’s coolest cop.” Crime fiction fans are sure to agree, especially those hooked on the novels of Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, Mark Billingham, and Jo Nesbø. The first book in a series of tense and twisting police procedurals, The Hollow Man starts with Belsey at rock bottom, and then embroils him in a brazen identity theft scam and possible murder that could leave him either wealthy or dead. It’s time to discover Oliver Harris, a new master of noir who’s destined to be a big man at the scene of the crime.

The Hollow Man: A Novel (Detective Nick Belsey Series, 1)

Literature & Fiction

Harris, Oliver

United States

Harper Paperbacks

In this gritty, white-knuckle crime thriller, Detective Nick Belsey—introduced in the acclaimed The Hollow Man as a shrewd, street-smart cynic who is one of London’s sharpest, but most unprincipled, investigators—is plunged into a perplexing mystery of secrets, danger, and suspense beneath the city’s streets.
Trouble once again finds Nick Belsey when he takes a date to an abandoned bomb shelter buried beneath the heart of London. One minute the young woman is there, and the next, she’s gone, mysteriously vanishing into the dark labyrinth of secret tunnels. A seasoned cop with a bad reputation, Nick knows that if he reports her disappearance, he’ll be the prime suspect. Instead, he’s going to find her. It’s not just her life at stake—it’s his, too.
Determined to discover who else is down in those forgotten tunnels, and how far this secret network of underground passages extends, he plunges head first into the investigation—and into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with a ruthless enemy who would rather let an innocent woman die than reveal old Cold War secrets hidden deep beneath the city’s streets.
An edgy, subversive thriller with the superb characterization of classic Lawrence Block and the psychological acuity and suspense of Sophie Hannah, Deep Shelter is a compulsively readable mystery from a master of literary suspense.

Deep Shelter: A Novel (Detective Nick Belsey Series, 2)

From the author of the acclaimed The Hollow Man and Deep Shelter, comes the third installment featuring the shrewd, cynical, and brilliant London detective, Nick Belsey, whose investigation into a child’s disappearance pulls him into the hedonistic orbit of a young, hot celebrity actress/musician and the dark world lurking underneath its glamorous exterior.
Twenty-seven, rich and beautiful, Amber Knight is living everyone’s dream. Her music career is established, her acting career is taking off, and she has a lifestyle fit for the top of the A-List. So why has she started acting so strangely? At least, that’s how it seems to Nick Belsey. A less celebrated resident of North London, Belsey’s decade-long career at Hampstead CID is coming to an abrupt end, but he still can’t seem to kick his habit of getting into serious trouble. When he’s asked by a desperate mother to help find her only son, Belsey has to infiltrate Amber’s glittering world. The seedy underside to her seemingly perfect life—a realm of excess, obsession, lust, and greed—doesn’t surprise him. What does is the blood trail that leads directly to Amber. As one twisted crime is followed by another, Belsey finds himself chasing even more answers than when he started out. And when the stakes are raised dangerously high, Belsey’s own survival is at stake. It may be too late to save his reputation but he’s not ready to die just yet—and especially not at the hands of a celebrity. 
“Harris has a terrific sense of place, hurtling between the wealthiest and most-run-down areas of London. But the cleverest thing about his third Belsey novel is the way the plot unfolds in a chilling and totally unexpected direction.”—Sunday Times (London)

HSE FAME (Detective Nick Belsey Series, 3)

Genre Fiction

HarperPB

The Hollow Man

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Vintage

A Shadow Intelligence

Literary

ABACUS +

'A twisting spiral of lies and corruption' Val McDermid 
From the hilltop he could see London, stretched towards the hills of Kent and Surrey. The sky was beginning to pale at the edges. The city itself looked numb as a rough sleeper; Camden and then the West End, the Square Mile. His watch was missing. He searched his pockets, found a bloodstained serviette and a promotional leaflet for a spiritual retreat, but no keys, phone or police badge. 
Detective Nick Belsey needs help. 
Something happened last night - something with the boss's wife - and Belsey needs to get out of London, and away from the debt and the drink and the deceit. 
Collecting his belongings back at Hampstead CID on what should be the last day of his career, Belsey sees a missing person's report. But this one's different; this is on The Bishop's Avenue, one of the most expensive streets in the city. Belsey sees a chance for a new life. 
But someone else got there first. 
Praise for A Hollow Man 
'[Belsey has] got to be London's coolest cop... Harris has plundered London's underworld for his richly plotted and unusual detective series... It's heady stuff' Daily Mail 
'Thrills, spills and fine writing' Telegraph

The Hollow Man (A Nick Belsey Novel)

Deep Shelter (A Nick Belsey Novel)

The House of Fame (A Nick Belsey Novel)

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2020\n“Thought-provoking...there’s certainly more than enough sharp writing and provocative content in this initial adventure to justify a sequel.” 
—Wall Street Journal\nThere is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane—volatile, inquisitive, free-floating—in the field. They take them and put two years and over £100k into their training, showing them how to steal cars, strip weapons, and hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of blackmail and improvised explosives, and entire workshops solely dedicated to navigating by the stars. But no one tells them how to go home.\nKane has spent fifteen years managing events overseas that never make the papers. He is a ghost in his own life, assuming and shedding personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when the woman he loves, another operative named Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is forced center stage in his own life.\nDrawn ever deeper into a realm of deception and conflicting agendas, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to steering them. While he's well-versed in modern psychological warfare, snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges—poised between China, Russia, and the West, dictatorship and democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of private agencies, it’s impossible to work out who is manipulating whom. And Kane’s not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.

A Shadow Intelligence (An Elliot Kane Thriller)

Mariner Books

Ascension (An Elliot Kane Thriller)

Product Description 
British spy Elliot Kane is forced out of semi-retirement to investigate a colleague’s suspicious death on Ascension Island, a remote and rocky outpost of the British military in the middle of the Atlantic.\nDespite uncovering a deep plot to incite a new world war, Elliot Kane has been on probation with the service since his misadventures in Kazakhstan. Having taken up a job teaching college literature and linguistics, he surprisingly enjoys living a conventional life and wonders if he would even go back to spycraft. Then a colleague from an ages-ago mission reaches out with a request. One of her tech specialists was on a long-term mission, in deep cover, but has suddenly killed himself. The agency is afraid to finish this vital mission without knowing what prompted this seemingly healthy man to take his own life. The carrot in this offer is helping his old friend; the stick is a worse punishment from the Agency if he doesn’t comply. So Elliott poses as an academic researcher and heads to one of the most remote places on the planet, Ascension Island.\nArriving on a rocky, barely livable island located in the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between Brazil and Angola, Kane is unsure whom to trust and why this lonely outpost is so important to the British military . . . until he uncovers dangerous secrets that lead straight back to London’s highest offices. 
 Review 
PRAISE FOR 
A SHADOW INTELLIGENCE\nAN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2020\n“Thought-provoking...there’s certainly more than enough sharp writing and provocative content in this initial adventure to justify a sequel.”\n—Wall Street Journal\n“This may be the deepest a contemporary spy novel has penetrated the cold new world of dark web intelligence and cellphone surveillance…. An absorbing, superbly written novel likely to stand as one of the best spy novels of the year.”\n—Kirkus, starred review\n“Oliver Harris is always pure quality and I’m loving the hell out of his foray into the contemporary spy novel. Elegant and compulsive.”\n—Ian Rankin\n“Elliot Kane needs his wits about him to keep track of his own identities and those of fellow MI6 agent Joanna, who he's looking for in Kazakhstan. The binary simplicity of the Cold War has been replaced by a geopolitical Rubik's cube of corruption, nationalism, oil money and internet deceit. 
 Tremendous evocation of modern Kazakhstan and the contemporary intelligence landscape. Scary if true, or even half true.”\n—Sunday Times Crime Club, star pick\n“Elliott Kane is an unusually thoughtful spy . . . As much a thinker as a doer, Kane has much in common with le Carré's Jerry Westerby or Lionel Davidson's Johnny Porter, a plausibly multi-faceted old school operator with the skills—physical, psychological, intellectual—to negotiate the geopolitical fault lines of central Asia as Russia and China square up over Kazahstan's untapped oil reserves.”\n—Irish Times\n“A Middle East specialist, flies to Astana in Kazakhstan to search for his former colleague and lover Joanna, and gets caught up in the jostling for power, deals and intelligence in a city portrayed as becoming a 21st-century mecca for spooks . . . Classier writing, fresher characters, original setting, a real sense of insider lore (on both spycraft and geopolitics).”\n—Sunday Times\n“A splendid thriller with new perspectives on places and the distinctly unclean side of the great game of espionage.”\n—Crime Time (Blog)\n“A gripping, fast-moving and intelligent novel from new spy fiction star Oliver Harris which will leave readers wanting a lot more Elliot Kane adventures.”\n—Irish Independent\n“Elliot Kane is highly-trained MI6 spook. So highly-trained that he's pretty much forgotten who the hell he really is after years of false identities and subterfuge . . . In a deadly world of deception by just about every nasty state, and that includes his own, he's truly up against it in this complex thriller that keeps you on your toes throughout. 
"\n—Sunday Sp

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