The holy grail for a certain genre of narrative nonfiction is a real-life story so fast paced and with such high stakes that it could match the page-turning tension of a fictional work from Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy or Lee Child. This is the terrain in which the Financial Times correspondent Miles Johnson has squarely pitched his debut, Chasing Shadows. To underline the point, the review copy comes with an endorsement from Child himself, who declares Chasing Shadows to be “as breathless, complex, and on-the-edge suspenseful as the finest thriller fiction – but it’s all real, which makes it truly extraordinary”.
The genre, then, feels familiar. This is a Manichean world in which the good guys are very good and the bad guys are extremely, relentlessly, nastily bad. Johnson introduces us to three leading men. The first is Jack Kelly, a hard-bitten agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s elite special operations division – “the Navy Seals of the DEA”, as one witness helpfully puts it – who carries a Glock and drives a Jeep Wrangler, about as macho a set of wheels as it is possible to buy. In the best tradition of heroic Hollywood lawmen, Kelly is a maverick and a loner who walks the mean streets so you don’t have to.
