JUDAS 62: The gripping new spy action thriller featuring BOX 88 from the master of the 21st century spy novel (BOX 88, Book 2)

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Comparisons to Le Carre are way off-beam though I think as Cumming is less cerebral and more “obvious” in his plots and character motivations.

Judas 62' involves one of the stars of the series kickoff, Lachlan Kite, as he discovers a pseudonym he'd used in the past is now a name on Russia's 'kill list', also known as the Judas list. A Foreign Country was named the first Scottish Crime Book of the Year at the inaugural Bloody Scotland Festival in Stirling in September 2012. Is he, Martha, or his family in danger of Russian assassins like so many other names on the list who have recently been killed? Cast in the role of an English language teacher, staying in a rundown apartment block in hot, airless Voronezh, the lonely Kite succumbs to the charms of Oksana, one of his adult pupils. And that could be four or five books down the line at the rate the overall story arc is progressing.But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. In the first timeline, it’s 1993 and Kite accepts an assignment to go to Russia undercover to spirit out a scientist who will otherwise be used by the Russian state to develop chemical weapons. The current day plot , culminating in Dubai, referenced the recent Russian crimes in Salisbury and elsewhere eg the cases of Navalny , Lutvinenko .

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. Cumming portrays an espionage world which comes across as authentic with its echoes of our contemporary realities, the Russians have shown no qualms in going after Russians in other countries, as we know to our cost, for example, with the Salisbury poisonings in the UK. A Foreign Country, his sixth novel, concerning the disappearance of the first female Chief of MI6, was published in 2012.Chemical weapons, espionage and the ghosts of the Cold War loom large in the second instalment of Charles Cumming’s enthralling series that revolves around the top-secret intelligence agency of Box 88.

More disturbingly still for Kite is that a former alias of his, Peter Galvin, has also been placed is on the list as JUDAS 62. The second book in Charles Cumming's gripping new thriller series surrounding BOX 88 - a covert intelligence organization that operates below the radar.Kite’s alias in 1993, was for his operation to spring a young Russian scientist Yuri Aranov to the West. My thanks to HarperCollins UK and NetGalley for supplying a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. In the first book in the series, our protagonist Lachlan (“Lockie”) Kite was recruited straight out of his English boarding school in 1989 to spy on the father of a school friend. The fact that Putin's Russian thugs continue to feel free to murder people in the UK, safe in the knowledge that there will be no effective deterrence, makes the plot of this book more relevant than the average thriller.

The first half of the book is set within that mission, with Kite almost alone in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Russia. And now, as the director of the outfit's operations in the UK, one of those past enemies has him in their sights. This is a list of people the Russians feel betrayed by and who are therefore likely targets for elimination. S. source for Box 88, the transatlantic counterintelligence and top secret spy agency, named Saul Kaszeta is off for a four-day fishing vacation to Lake Placid in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. This loss of a trusted foreign spy source does not sit well with Box 88, especially master spy Lachlan Kite who had developed the relationship.

The contemporary element is more complex and involves an veritable army of characters, this I found slightly less satisfying.