Shadows of the Kestrel

He didn’t know the system had a name for him.
He didn’t know the name was Kestrel.

When a covert handoff goes lethal, operative Tavian Corvus recovers a drive he wasn’t supposed to survive long enough to open. Buried inside: his own name, flagged at ninety-one percent probability by a shadow program that has been quietly resolving inconvenient operatives for eleven years.

Forty-three people. Now him.

The program doesn’t improvise. It models. It has already calculated his likely routes, his probable contacts, the handlers he trusts and shouldn’t. It has been running his pattern for longer than he’s known it existed. The only thing it cannot account for is a man who understands exactly how he’s being read — and chooses, deliberately, to become unreadable.

His handler is running a play he hasn’t been told about. Falcon is pulling strings from somewhere Tavian can’t locate. And the leak feeding his position to the enemy is inside the network he built himself.

Shadows of the Kestrel is a novel about what it costs to trust the machinery you were trained to serve — and what it takes to dismantle it from the inside when the machinery decides you’re a liability.

“When Tavian found his own name in the Kestrel file, FLAGGED and marked for resolution, my stomach dropped. That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just a chase — it was personal — and I couldn’t stop.”
Ethan J. Anderson, Verified ARC Reviewer

For readers of John le Carré, Tana French, and Daniel Silva.

Mystery thriller · A Tavian Corvus Novel