Insertion

David Carver builds the systems modern Britain runs on: railways, power, the vast public programmes that are meant to be too well governed to fail. He is a senior programme manager by day and, on the weekends the Army still asks for, a Reserve intelligence officer. He has spent a career believing the process holds.

Then his oldest friend dies in a "procedural failure" on a station platform, and the voicemail David never returned becomes the only thing he can hear.

Tom Ashcroft left an audit behind. It points to a pattern – quiet commercial acquisitions placing a foreign hand at the heart of the country's critical infrastructure – and the signature on the order that matters belongs to David's own mentor. Within hours the file is buried. His firm opens a review against him. A listening device appears on his garden fence. The police arrive on a Tuesday evening with questions they should not yet be able to ask.

Cut loose from the channels meant to protect him, his family sent north, David is drawn into an off-books operation beside a retired officer who has waited eleven years for this to surface. What they find is not a foreign service. It is something older, quieter, and far harder to prosecute.

In the tradition of John le Carré and Mick Herron, INSERTION is a thriller about institutional compromise and the question every honest professional meets in the end: when the system stops working, what was it ever for?