The Sandpit
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"When John Dyer returns to Oxford from Brazil with his young son, he doesn't expect to find them both in danger. Every day is the same. He drops Leandro at his smart prep school and walks to the library to research his new book. His time living on the edge as a foreign correspondent in Rio is over. But the rainy streets of this English city turn out to be just as treacherous as those he used to walk in the favelas. Leandro's schoolmates are the children of influential people, among them an international banker, a Russian oligarch, an American CIA operative and a British spook. As they congregate round the sports field for the weekly football matches, the network of alliances and covert interests that spreads between these power brokers soon becomes clear to Dyer. But it is a chance conversation with an Iranian nuclear scientist, Rustum Marvar, father of a friend of Leandro, that sets him onto a truly precarious path. When Marvar and his son disappear, several sinister factions seem acutely interested in Marvar's groundbreaking research at the Clarendon Lab, and what he might have told Dyer about it, given Dyer was the last person to see Marvar alive."--Publisher's description.
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A mixed bag for me, this one. To begin with I struggled with the clunky prose, which is truly dreadful at times, but the more I read, the more the story began to capture me, and I started reading huge chunks at a time. I found it increasingly easier to ignore my misgivings over the style, and indeed over the daftness of the whole setup (it's an espionage story involving at least four different countries chasing the MacGuffin, and yet every single character involved in this chase is connected to the same school in Oxford). So it became a pacy and engrossing read, and then I hit the ending. On a narrative level, it's deeply unsatisfying, but I reckon you could make a case for it being a political allegory, an illustration of the way strife rolls down from the rich and powerful to those less able to deal with it. Maybe, maybe not.
Essentially what we have here is a thriller with pretensions. Those pretensions don't always convince, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't keep me turning the pages.