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The Ghost has everything a great thriller needs. There's the slightly-too-curious-for-his-own-good Everyman who stumbles onto something huge, there's the geeky technical delight in details (here, of ghostwriting), and there's the strong suspense and atmosphere of barely-restrained menace. There's even the obligatory and now outdated scene where the protagonist, badly shaken, does his research in an internet cafe, and the obligatory scene where a GPS is used to retroactively follow someone. If a political thriller with a lot of cynicism and a slow boil sounds good to you, you will enjoy The Ghost.

Our unnamed narrator is a long-time professional ghostwriter, most prominently of celebrity memoirs, who is suddenly thrust into the political sphere when he's tapped to take on Adam Lang's memoirs. Lang, we quickly learn, is the controversial former Prime Minister whose reputation in Britain has been sullied by his close relationship with America and promotion of the War on Terror; even now, accusations of Lang having facilitated the CIA torture of British citizens float through the news. Our protagonist has one month to make something out of the massive and almost unreadable manuscript left to him by his predecessor, Lang's longtime aide, who died in a suspicious accident while working on the book. It would be enough to make anyone back off if the money for rushing it through to publication wasn't ridiculously good.

The ghost finds himself drawn into Lang's life--his genuine charm, his possible sins, his psychological slipperiness that makes the task of writing in his voice so difficult. Not to mention his wife, Ruth, brilliant and unpredictably chilly, and his aide/mistress, Amelia, witty and driven. All the ghost has to do is keep his head down and write, but he finds himself poking at loose ends in Lang's stories. What to make of the polished anecdote that turns out to be almost completely fabricated? The insistence on minimizing the entirety of his early dramatic career? The private phone number of Lang's enemy scribbled on the back of a seemingly innocent picture?

The Ghost develops its unease as it goes along, and manages the difficult trick of keeping you sure that something is going on--it says something about the world that at no point is there any real doubt that Lang did in fact aid the CIA in kidnapping and torturing his own citizens*, in the narrator's mind or in anyone else's. That's not, ultimately, what the suspense is really about--while nonetheless winning your emotional involvement in the Langs and their lives. There's an especially good scene where the ghost, under pressure, composes a quick statement for Lang to give to the press in the midst of the controversy, finding himself almost becoming an accomplice to whatever cover-up is going on. He didn't mean to. He just got swept up in it. So did I.


* Bleak note from the past: Harris's hero has to look up what waterboarding is.