1995: In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, 24-year-old spy Lachlan Kite and his girlfriend, Martha Raine, are sent to Senegal on the trail of a hunted war criminal. The mission threatens to spiral out of control, forcing Kite to make choices which will have devastating consequences not only for his career at top-secret intelligence agency BOX 88, but also for his relationship with Martha. 2023: Eric Appiah, an old friend from Kite's days at school and an off-the-record BOX 88 asset, makes contact with explosive information about what happened all those years ago in West Africa. When tragedy strikes, Kite must use all the resources at his disposal to protect Martha from a criminal network with links to international terror. Charles Cumming once again straddles two timelines to create a high-tension thriller in this latest Lachlan Kite novel.
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A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the YearThe most closely-guarded secret of the Cold War is about to be exposed - the identity of a SIXTH member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring. And people are killing for it, in Charles Cumming's bestselling thriller The Trinity Six. London, 1992. Late one night, Edward Crane, 76, is declared dead at a London hospital. An obituary describes him only as a 'resourceful career diplomat'. But Crane was much more than that - and the circumstances surrounding his death are far from what they seem. Fifteen years later, academic Sam Gaddis needs money. When a journalist friend asks for his help researching a possible sixth member of the notorious Trinity spy ring, Gaddis knows that she's onto a story that could turn his fortunes around. But within hours the journalist is dead, apparently from a heart attack. Taking over her investigation, Gaddis trails a man who claims to know the truth about Edward Crane. Europe still echoes with decades of deadly disinformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And as Gaddis follows a series of leads across the continent, he approaches a shocking revelation - one which will rock the foundations of politics from London to Moscow... "Cumming's novel is characterized by a gripping sense of realism. He displays a vast knowledge of spycraft and Cold War history, and the dense, three-dimensional world he crafts comes complete with seedy hotels and smoky nightclubs. The result is absolutely gripping. Taut, atmospheric and immersive--an instant classic." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on The Trinity Six Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Thrillers.
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In the newest entry in Charles Cumming's bestselling BOX 88 series, master spy Lachlan Kite heads to Athens, Greece, after an old flame asks for help locating her missing son. A threat to the lives of his wife and daughter in London forces elite intelligence agent Lachlan Kite to move his family to safety. Meanwhile Kite's former girlfriend, Martha Raine, comes to him with a plea for help. Her twenty-year-old son, Max, has vanished without trace in Greece. Can Kite help to find him? Analysts at Anglo-American intelligence agency BOX 88 discover that Max was in a relationship with an Israeli woman, Jessica Morrow, who has links to the Mossad. Morrow is being hunted by a ruthless criminal gang. Fearing the worst, Kite and Martha set out for Athens in a desperate attempt to locate Max and Jessica. A thrilling, complex tale, the depth of which is matched by its page-turning suspense, Icarus 17 once again proves Charles Cumming to be one of the greatest writers of the modern day spy novel. As Financial Times notes, he excels at "taking the spy thriller to a new level of storytelling, one that illuminates the darkest corners of our modern world."
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After a lifetime working with BOX 88, the transatlantic counterintelligence agency so covert that not even the CIA knows of its existence, master spy Lachlan Kite has made plenty of enemies. And now, as the director of the outfit's operations in the UK, one of those past enemies has him in their sights... 1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia, a spy in the guise of a language teacher. Embedded in the town of Voronezh, Kite's mission is to extract a chemical weapons scientist before the man's groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands and shuttle him across the border to freedom in Ukraine. But Kite's mission soon goes wrong and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. 2020: Thirty years after that dangerous mission, Kite discovers that its outcome put his name on the notorious "JUDAS" list--a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination. Kite's fight for survival takes him to Dubai, a city crawling with international intelligence officers, where he enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian secret state. The newest installment in the saga of "a spy for the 21st century" (Daily Mail) combines two pulse-pounding narratives that show why Cumming is among the top tier of espionage authors examining the reality of spycraft in the post-Cold War era.
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Lachlan Kite is a member of BOX 88, an elite transatlantic black ops outfit so covert that not even MI6 and the CIA are certain of its existence -- but even the best spy can't anticipate every potential threat in a world where dangerous actors lurk around every corner. At the funeral of his childhood best friend, Lachlan falls into a trap that drops him into the hands of a potentially deadly interrogation, with his pregnant wife, also abducted, being held as collateral for the information he's sworn on his own life to protect. Thirty years earlier Lachlan, then just out of the upper class boarding school where he was reared, was BOX 88's newest recruit. In the haze of a gap year summer, in which the study of spycraft was intertwined with a journey of self-discovery, he cut his teeth on a special assignment on the coast of France, where a friendship allowed him special access to one of Iran's most dangerous men. Today, Lachlan's nostalgia for the trip is corrupted by recollection of the deceit that accompanied it but, in order to save his family, he'll be forced to revisit those painful memories one last time. A pulse-pounding narrative that straddles two eras -- 1989 and 2020 -- BOX 88 is a "wonderfully taut, exciting and up-to-date spy thriller" that introduces a compelling new character and a captivating international storyline (Spectator, Books of the Year).
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From the internationally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of The Trinity Six, comes Charles Cumming's A Foreign Country, a compelling tale of deceit and betrayal, conspiracy and redemption. On the vacation of a lifetime in Egypt, an elderly French couple are brutally murdered. Days later, a meticulously-planned kidnapping takes place on the streets of Paris. Amelia Levene, the first female Chief of MI6, has disappeared without a trace, six weeks before she is due to take over as the most influential spy in Europe. It is the gravest crisis MI6 has faced in more than a decade. Desperate not only to find her, but to keep her disappearance a secret, Britain's top intelligence agents turn to one of their own: disgraced MI6 officer Thomas Kell. Tossed out of the Service only months before, Kell is given one final chance to redeem himself - find Amelia Levene at any cost. The trail leads Kell to France and Tunisia, where he uncovers a shocking secret and a conspiracy that could have unimaginable repercussions for Britain and its allies. Only Kell stands in the way of personal and political catastrophe.
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Internationally acclaimed as "a premier writer of espionage thrillers" (USA Today), Charles Cumming is "among the most skillful spy novelists" (Washington Post) and "a worthy successor to the masters...like John le Carré and Len Deighton" (Chicago Sun-Times). Now, with A Colder War, Cumming returns with MI6 agent Tom Kell (A Foreign Country), in a tour de force that will dazzle readers and critics alike. A top-ranking Iranian military official is blown up while trying to defect to the West. An investigative journalist is arrested and imprisoned for writing an article critical of the Turkish government. An Iranian nuclear scientist is assassinated on the streets of Tehran. These three incidents, seemingly unrelated, have one crucial link. Each of the three had been recently recruited by Western intelligence, before being removed or killed. Then Paul Wallinger, MI6's most senior agent in Turkey, dies in a puzzling plane crash. Fearing the worst, MI6 bypasses the usual protocol and brings disgraced agent Tom Kell in from the cold to investigate. Kell soon discovers what Wallinger had already begun to suspect--that there's a mole somewhere in the Western intelligence, a traitor who has been systematically sabotaging scores of joint intelligence operations in the Middle East.
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Real espionage. Real consequences.
Charles Cumming writes intelligence fiction without the gloss—slow-burn tension, political nuance, and agents who live with the cost of their choices. Drawing on real-world experience, his novels unfold in surveillance rooms and diplomatic shadows, where power is fragile and loyalty rarely survives intact.
If you like le Carré-style realism and modern European spy fiction that trusts the reader, start here.
