Review: The Shadow Broker

Tina Clough’s new Wellington-set thriller begins when a friend returns a misplaced phone to our protagonist Minnie, a researcher turned high school teacher, who has returned to live at home to look after her father who is suffering with Alzheimer’s disease.

It looks like her phone and, strangely, has the same PIN number - but it belongs to someone else. Intrigued by the strange, coded messages from someone called Broker which she discovers on it, Minnie calls a white-hat hacker friend (everyone has one of those right?) named Rumble to look at it. Rumble confirms her suspicions, whoever owns this phone is into some rather shady stuff and by the looks of it has some high-powered government connections.

Clough has set this in 2026 - as our democracy is under threat post-Covid and the government has instigated a watch list to control dissent (the dystopian theme is becoming quite a thing in the local thriller community with Kirsten McDougall’s excellent She’s a Killer set in similar circumstances.)

There are also rumours that the government has a kill list, can monitor citizen’s communications and punish “subversives” with long prison sentences. In short Big Business is running the government through powerful and wealthy lobbyists and are cementing power with bribes and intimidation.

Minnie is also involved in a high-school science project with her students that has attracted media interest which should be good news, but it also threatens to make public her difficult past and perhaps kickstart a moribund love-life with an ex-parliamentary reporter. Clough drip-feeds the reader information regarding Minnie’s backstory - a childhood accident, trouble with alcohol - keeping the reader guessing and adding layers of complexity to a character who appears, at first, rather pedestrian.

Before long Minnie, Rumble and reporter Luke team up to uncover the corruption at the heart of the government - but how far can they get when up against forces with great reach and power?

Clough’s probably best known for her Hunter Grant series; one critic compared Grant to Jack Reacher and while there are action scenes here too, much of the plot (perhaps too much for some readers) is progressed through dialogue with Clough keeping the focus on the relationships between the three main characters.

Clough is particularly good at mapping the growing bond between Luke and the ever-wary Minnie (she tells him she’s gay at first to forestall any attempt at a romantic relationship) which develops in unconventional ways.

The Shadow Broker is a solid, compelling thriller that touches on topical issues like state surveillance, post-Trump politics and corruption in the halls of power.

As Luke observes early on, “You might think that really hard-core scheming for political power went out with the Medicis centuries ago, but it is alive and well in Parliament.” One senses that Clough sees plenty of potential in this line of political thriller; perhaps we haven’t seen the last of Minnie and her unlikely partners.

Reviewed by Greg Fleming