The Silver Fish

A second-rate foreign correspondent gets sucked into deadly tensions between the U.S. and China in Martin’s lively if far-fetched debut. Hard-drinking reporter Dani Moreau has washed up in Ghana, where she’s looking for a big story to get her foundering career back on track. While poking around for leads, she stumbles on a shadow war between the CIA and Chinese operatives, who are jockeying for control of undersea fiber optic cables off the African coast, which power world communication. To report the story—and stay alive—Dani must navigate a landscape rife with oligarchs, assassins, and dishonorable politicos. Martin’s traumatized, messy lead often comes across more like a walking cliché than a three-dimensional character, and it’s hard to root for her journalistic success when she barely manages to conduct a single interview over the course of several months. A smattering of cliff-hangers and a hard-charging finale keep the pages turning, but Dani’s flatness as a character and some implausible late-stage plot developments muddy the waters. Though Martin shows promise, this doesn’t quite hang together. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)