You can’t really make this stuff up any more, political reality having long since outpaced fiction, but thank goodness there are people who continue to try. Recent history has supplied more than enough intrigue, misinformation, diplomatic doublespeak and sheer zone-flooding mad shit to challenge even the most inventive writer of political thrillers, but fortunately Andrew Rosenheim is more than up for it.

His new novel, The Interpreter’s Secret, is an interesting sort of crossbreed of the old Le Carré-style of spy thriller – rich in ambiguities, details of bureaucratic intrigue and hand-wringing moral compromises – and the contemporary high-octane, hyperkinetic kind of thing in which super-jacked, tooled-up people are forever running around and which tend to read more like Netflix pilot scripts than actual books.

The novel’s premise is simple. Thomas Weaver, an interpreter working for the State Department in New York, finds himself attending a G20 summit in Stockholm, where he is unexpectedly drawn into a clandestine meeting between senior American and Russian figures. What he hears suggests the existence of a secret understanding between Washington and Moscow. Having accidentally recorded the conversation, Weaver is suddenly transformed from innocent observer into unwilling participant: classic. His resulting flight as he is relentlessly hunted down across London and some of the pleasanter parts of England provides the plot. Hints here of John Buchan, Rogue Male and indeed Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

The book’s most intriguing aspect is perhaps not the conspiracy itself but Rosenheim’s choice of protagonist. Tom Hanks is way too old now to reprise his role as Robert Langdon in the Da Vinci Code films, but if he weren’t he’d make an excellent Weaver. Divorced, naturally, and just a little bit seamy round the edges, Weaver, like Langdon, has a photographic memory; and though he is far from possessed of Harvard symbologist levels of intuitive brilliance, he has at least lucked out with a cushy job as an interpreter, having previously translated the works of obscure Russian poets.

Thrillers traditionally privilege those with power – spies, politicians, soldiers and intelligence officers. An interpreter occupies an entirely different sort of position: present but not powerful, indispensable but also invisible. Weaver’s professional duty is to facilitate communication. The Interpreter’s Secret is a book about what happens when various kinds of communication break down entirely.

Rosenheim has long been interested in the relationship between language, systems, ideas and individuals. He’s one of those old-fashioned, cerebral types of writer – what we used to think of perhaps just as writers – whose earlier fiction, including an excellent trilogy of historical crime novels featuring Special Agent James Nessheim, has often explored the world of emerging technology, malfunctioning institutions and the unforeseen consequences of specialised knowledge. In Weaver he may have found his perfect new series character: a sophisticated, professional expert with wide-ranging interests whose narrow competence unexpectedly grants him access to dangerous truths and hidden realms. Again, classic. Weaver is the ultimate ordinary citizen cursed and blessed with insider knowledge.

The book also boasts a strong supporting cast. Weaver’s best friend, J.P. Harbinger, is a Goldman Sachs banker who’s busy living a fabulous life, mostly fly-fishing, in a house in Wiltshire which is listed in Pevsner’s Buildings of England and is the setting for some of the best scenes. Harbinger is also, amusingly and entirely believably, a ‘doofus’. Weaver’s father, meanwhile, is a hard-ass FBI guy who eventually comes through to help him out. There’s a dodgy Russian art dealer, various loyal and treacherous colleagues, and then there’s Lily Churchill, who more than fulfils her role as the obligatory enigmatic foxy lady. Part Elizabeth Bennet, part Pussy Galore, she keeps both Weaver and the reader guessing for large parts of the book. ‘She had swept her hair up into a loose topknot, and it made her face all the more striking: a small, rounded jaw, large appraising eyes and lips set in a wry smile, as if she had seen it all and found it mostly funny.’ Will they or won’t they?

One of the enduring pleasures of espionage fiction lies in its resistance to certainty: readers are invited to occupy the same predicament as the protagonist, never entirely sure who’s trustworthy, whose motives are genuine, or whether apparent allies are in fact adversaries. The very best thrillers exploit this uncertainty not merely for the purposes of suspense but for insights into the fragility of political and personal trust. In a book full of nice, sly literary nods and references, perhaps the most significant is that Weaver hides a recording device behind a copy of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity – like I say, classic.