The Ghost

by Robert Harris

Most of the action takes place on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where Lang has been holed up in the holiday home of his billionaire American publisher to turn out his memoirs on a deadline. Other scenes are set in Notting Hill, New York and Whitehall.

Lang's former aide, Mike McAra, has been struggling to ghost the former politician's memoirs. However, as the novel opens, McAra drowns when he apparently falls off the Woods Hole ferry. The fictional narrator of The Ghost, whose name is never revealed, is hired to replace him. His girlfriend walks out on him over his willingness to take the job: "She felt personally betrayed by him; she used to be a party member". He soon suspects foul play and stumbles across evidence of possible motive, buried in Lang's Cambridge past. Having located what may be the lethal secret, the replacement ghostwriter begins to fear for his own safety.

Meanwhile, Lang, like his real-life counterpart, is accused by his enemies of war crimes. A leaked memorandum has revealed that he secretly approved the capture and the extraordinary rendition of British citizens to Guantanamo Bay to face interrogation and torture. Richard Rycart, Lang's disillusioned and renegade former foreign secretary (loosely based on Robin Cook), who before and during his early days in office made much of his wish to adopt an "ethical" foreign policy, is now at the United Nations in a position to do his former boss serious damage. Unlike Blair, Lang thus appears in imminent threat of indictment at the International Criminal Court.

The narrator tussles to reconcile his obligation to complete the ghosting job with its attendant abundant payment on the one hand and, the pressing need, as he sees it, to reveal Lang's true allegiances on the other hand. The action heats up when he contacts Rycart. The narrator comes under increasing jeopardy romantically, politically and physically.