Judas 62 - Charles Cumming

 I have blogged before about how highly I rate Charles Cumming.   He is by some distance the best British spy novelist, very much the successor to John le Carre.   For me, Judas 62 confirms his status.  I have enjoyed everything I've read by Cumming, which is most of his work, but Judas 62 is so contemporary and so deeply plotted that I think he has hit a new high.

Judas 62 is the successor to Box 88 which I haven't yet read.  Box 88 is a specialist Secret Service operation combating biological weapons.   Lachlan Kite was tapped on the shoulder whilst still a studentt at Edinburgh in the early Nineties; now he is the senior man in London.   It is the summer of 2020 and the pandemic is raging.   News comes through that one of Box's former moles, now living as a retired academic in the States, has been murdered - assassinated, in facr, with Novichock in the same brand of eye medicine I use (AAAGH!).   The victim, Palatnik, was on Putin's Judas list, the traitors to the state greenlit for reprisal killing.   Kite, too, is on that list, at position 62, not as Lachlan Kite but as Peter Galvin, the alias he lived under when, in the long vacation of 1993, he went to Russia to extract their top biological scientist Yuri Aranov, acting on information supplied by the now deceased Evgeny Palatmik.

So we have two stories ingeniously intertwined, the Galvin-Aranov mission of 1993, and Kite's 2020 scheme to entrap the FSB agents responsible for Palatnik's murder.  Aronov, thirty years older but not a day more mature, is to be the bait because the KGB man in backwater Voronezh in '93, Mikhail Gromik, is now the officially retired ex-KGB oligarch living in the United Arab Emirates, secretly in charge of implementing the Judas list.   The proof of that is Galvin's name on the list.  Only Gromik knows who got Aranov out of Russia, but all that Gromik knows about him is the fake name.

As I say, it's brilliantly done - 500 pages that never once flag.   I must get hold of Box 88 and I genuinely can't wait to find out where the series goes next.