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Cumming, in this book, transforms the history of espionage - It’s change and continuity, into a tour de force of thrilling, literal and rapidly page-turning intensity.
Box 88 by Charles Cumming is an outstanding espionage novel which is is superbly written has an excellent main underlying storyline and well drawn out main and supporting characters. is set in Brooklyn, where the gentrification of a neglected neighbourhood is taking a sinister turn. Kite’s story is told from two perspectives: that of the older, experienced operative, decades into his career as a spy; and that of Kite as an 18 year old, on his first mission. Lockie Kite works for a very secret intelligence unit ,he attends an old friends funeral when he is kidnapped . Another really well written, suspenseful story of espionage spanning several timelines, starting with the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am flight 103, the collapse of the Berlin Wall to current times.This is the story of Lachlan (Lockie) Kite and how he is recruited into Box 88, a covert, below the radar US/UK espionage group. If 21st century spying is increasingly akin to a technocracy, Cumming reminds us of its rather more basic, yet complex, human element: the spy as the ultimate human dissembler. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. Taken captive and subjected to torture, Kite is presented with a simple choice: reveal the truth about what happened in France thirty years earlier – or watch his family die. There are some wonderful examples of good old fashioned tradecraft, such as dead drops and chalk marks on walls, which really appealed to me.
The Lockerbie bombing looms large in people’s minds, Salman Rushdie is in protective custody following Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa and events in Tehran continue to cause concerns.
In both time frames he regrets the duplicity which threatens the integrity of his romantic relationships but he is also a quick-thinking pragmatist with the greater good in mind. As Lockie tries to save his life and that of his wife and unborn child who are also in danger, he reveals information about a Summer long ago when, as an 18 year old 6th form student, he was recruited by a top secret spy ring to find information about the Lockerbie bombing and those responsible.
The temporal and geographic location remains the same – Ireland in the 1950s – with a touch of Agatha Christie as a body is discovered in the library of a Protestant Wexford landowner.Kite quickly learns that his abduction is connected with a summer spent in France many years ago when he was first recruited to Box 88 as a young public school boy.
M15 have Kite under surveillance and while attending a funeral of his school friend Xavier, Kite is abducted. How the personal elides with the professional is an aspect of espionage largely forgotten in the zeitgeist of the modern spy thriller - not in Cumming’s books. As soon as I have finished one of Charles Cumming's' spy novels, I am waiting impatiently for the next one.I have never come across Charles Cumming before however I will now be looking out for any books by him. However, we quickly learn that Box 88 is the name of a top secret subset of MI6 and the CIA in joint collaboration. An excellent spy thriller which opens in 2020 when our protagonist, Lachlan Kite attends a funeral of an old school friend and our antennae should start twitching when he accepts a lift from someone he met at the funeral. He finds his loyalties torn, and guilt accumulating when it comes to the Bonnard family, and in the midst of it all, is the flowering of his romantic relationship with Martha.
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