Cumming maintains both pace and suspense well throughout and the only real grumble I have – and it’s a personal thing – is that I find any book with so many active participants (there’s an index listing more than thirty at the beginning of the book) to be hard work in tracking who is who as the tale plays out. I really enjoyed Box 88 but this one has a very slow start, it’s convoluted, gets bogged down in unnecessary background and it makes my head spin! The story then flashes back to 1993, and Kite’s mission to aid in the defection of a top Russian scientist specialising in chemical weapons while posing as an English teacher in Voronezh. They end up connecting and meeting secretly and this is where Peter/Kite gains his trust and learns that Yuri intends to also bring along his pregnant girlfriend. In the present, a former Russian General is murdered with Novichok in a horrifying, manner in the Adirondacks in the U.

A Foreign Country, his sixth novel, concerning the disappearance of the first female Chief of MI6, was published in 2012. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. One minor niggle is that Eton College, England's poshest secondary school (think Prince William and Boorish Johnson ) is disguised as 'Alford' for reasons that escape me. The second half, set in the present, then becomes a riveting a spy thriller that is the equal of Daniel Silva or Gerald Seymour.If talk of temperature-taking, mask-wearing, social-distancing, limited-capacity restaurants, etc is a trigger for you— you might not want to read this one. Spanning London, Russia and Dubai, Judas 62 is an old school espionage thriller that aficionados of the genre will love!

He was educated at Eton College (1985-1989) and the University of Edinburgh (1990-1994), where he graduated with First Class Honours in English Literature. The Hidden Man also examines the clandestine role played by SIS and the CIA during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. In fact, in this episode Lachlan heads up the British end and discovers to his horror that he’s on a list of people the Russians are planning to assassinate. Secret agent Lachlan Kite faces peril in Dubai as a brutal ghost from his past works his way down a Russian kill list – with Lachlan and one of his key contacts next in line.The list is comprised of people Russia considers traitors and spies and the addition of Kite presents an opportunity to settle some scores form his past. It is forbidden to copy anything for publication elsewhere without written permission from the copyright holder. This was a fascinating experience for the young Lachlan Kite, yet without the assistance of Aranov he may as well have been walking alone in a dense forest without purpose. A strangely stilted book, partly down to the new (slightly wooden) narrator but also through the storytelling.

A Foreign Country was named the first Scottish Crime Book of the Year at the inaugural Bloody Scotland Festival in Stirling in September 2012. The end result is a spy novel that reads like a high-octane thriller and succeeds on nearly every level! If you like spy thrillers heavy on nuanced characterization and subtlety, and light on guns and action, then you will certainly enjoy this series.Lachlan Kite is a “spy” and in the first book he was sent to Russia to extricate a chemical weapons scientist who.

Even so, Charles Cumming's prose is concise and he knows how to bring his characters to life, which makes even the slow parts become an immersive reading experience. It may be replete with expensive bars and restaurants, but even the most supposedly respectable are haunted by trafficked women: Dubai’s rulers seem almost to encourage expat debauchery while professing to maintain Islamic standards for those born in the Emirates. My fear now is that Cumming will stick to this structure in subsequent books, doing a back-and-forwards at least until we get to the bit in Lockie's life story where we learn how/why/when he broke up with Martha. It’s firmly set in the context of political upheaval following the fall of Gorbachev and the onset of the presidency of Yeltsin. The first novel in this series, Box 88, saw the introduction of Lachlan Kite and his recruitment into the joint MI6/CIA organisation known as Box 88.

The mission largely goes off without a hitch, with the only complications arising from the avoidable social and relationship drama Kite stupidly gets himself embroiled in.