A missing-person case leads a nameless inspector into a shady underworld of corrupt corporations, random disappearances and duplicitous men in suits. So far, so noir. But as the narrator-inspector of Martin MacInnes’s genre-bending debut starts to disintegrate, both physically and psychologically, the book takes a sweeping diversion into the inspector’s own identification with the missing individual – a man who seems to have existed only as a cipher within an amorphous corporate enterprise that has no name, no central office and no traceable records. All of which makes Infinite Ground both peculiar and genuinely creepy, as it confidently fuses the sterile horror of the corporate world with the sensuous menace of the South American rainforest. 

The book brims with strong, startling ideas: the plot thread involving an agency that provides the mysterious corporation with actors, including fake office workers carefully distributed to motivate genuine employees and even a woman to play the grieving mother of the missing man, is particularly inspired. A scene viewed through