The Obsidian Register

John Percival spent twenty-two years in Naval Intelligence noticing things other people missed. Retirement, he has found, has not diminished the habit. When an admiral's offhand remark at a dinner connects five intelligence disasters across three decades to a single address in New Geneva - the Imperial Meridian, a hotel of impeccable discretion and no apparent politics - Percival travels there with no brief, no authority, and no clear idea of what he is looking for. What he finds is a concierge. Walther has been at his desk for thirty-one years. He corrects guests' grammar. He recommends the Haydn over the Brahms. He knows what you prefer before you tell him. He has never, in three decades, been the thing that anyone noticed. The Obsidian Register is a novel about observation - who conducts it, what it produces, and what it costs. It is about the patience required to build something over thirty years and the patience required to find it. It is about the difference between what can be proved and what is true, and about the particular loneliness of people who understand things they cannot say. Set in the tradition of Eric Ambler and John le Carré - quiet, precise, and relentlessly intelligent - this is a spy novel without spies, a crime novel without a crime, and a character study of two men whose professional formation has made them, against all probability, the only people in the world who fully understand each other. "Documents expire. Character does not."