Kennedy 35 - Charles Cumming

 I've been a fan of Charles Cumming since A Spy by Nature.   I especially enjoyed the Thomas Kell series and The Trinity Six.   The Box 88 novels, of which Kennedy 35 is the third, are on another level entirely.   The idea is of a super-secret organisation based primarily in London and New York - 'The Cathedral' and 'The Stadium' - operating worldwide, a blend of MI6 and the CIA but answerable to neither.   In each of three novels we follow Lachlan Kite at the beginning of his career in the Nineties and today as head of the senior wing in London.   In each novel the past and present collide, which calls for a masterclass in plotting by Cumming.

In this case we start in the mid-Nineties.   Kite is trained but on-hold, awaiting the call to service, meanwhile enjoying life with his girlfriend from university, Martha Raine.   The call comes.   Kite is summoned to Senegal.   He is to travel, with Martha as cover, posing as backpackers, and deliver a package to a Box 88 group planning to seize one of the prime movers behind the Rwandan genocide, Augustin Bagaza, and his mistress Grace Mavinga, known (with good reason) as Lady Macbeth.

Kite is supposed to deliver the package and go.   But Martha falls ill.   Kite is concerned about his contact, a French journalist called Philippe Vauban, who, as the only man who can authoritatively identify the target, seems a little ... odd.   So Kite leaves Martha in the care of an old friend from public school, a Senegalese playboy, Eric Appiah (who we know is trying to contact Kite in the present day) and gets more involved in the op.   In the end, Kite ends up cornering Bagaza and Grace in a nightclub.   Kite's job is to spook Bagaza into running, which he does.   Box 88 will do the rest.

The plan backfires horrifically.   Grace shoots and kills one of the local Box operatives.   Vauban goes mad and does to Bagaza what Bagaza did to his victims in Bagaza.   Grace escapes.   The French secret services do their best to cover up the whole episode because President Mitterand had financed the genocide.

Thirty years later, Eric Appiah contacts Kite in London to tell him he is working off-the-books with a French agent to bring Grace Mavinga to account.   Since Dakar, Grace has been living with a renegade French former spy called Yves Duval.   Together they have set up a phenomenonally successful money laundering scheme for terrorists.   Eric and his partner are on the verge of bringing the couple down - but an American blogger and podcaster has got hold of the original Dakar disaster story, including the names of Martha and Kite.

Before Kite and Eric can meet to discuss the situation, Eric falls from a towerblock in London.   Things were serious already.   Now they get personal.

Kennedy 35 is as good as anything Cumming has done previously.   Cumming is already the best British spy author and Kennedy 35 enshrines that status.

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.