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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Box 88 is an Anglo-American deeply covert spy agency with Lachlan (Lockie) Kite being recruited whilst still a young man at Alford School. The Hidden Man also examines the clandestine role played by SIS and the CIA during the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

It feels like a TV series where they make a character go travel somewhere because the actor is busy on another project and they have to figure out how to work around it. 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.I am also not super well-versed when it comes to spy novels so perhaps my evaluation isn’t as full as it could be.

This works on many levels, Kite as a young man in his 20s shown signs of the man he will become but also the inexperience and naivety of his youth. A president with three wives and a penchant for porn actresses can be proclaimed by his supporters as a man of God. There’s unease, the claustrophobic sense of the watching FSK (former KGB and now FSB) and the uncertainty of evading them, there’s danger at every turn, who is trustworthy and who can be bribed and there are moments of high tension. Typhoon, published in 2008, is a political thriller about a CIA plot to destabilise China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics.Personally, I did not find it as much of a page turner as the first in the series but still a highly enjoyable - and recommended - read. 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.

I really enjoyed this book and it flowed on so well with the characters from the first book, BOX 88. 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.The mission largely goes off without a hitch, with the only complications arising from the avoidable social and relationship drama Kite stupidly gets himself embroiled in. Both parts however more than hold their own, and the links both with Covid and Putin’s poisoning of opponents in the West are genuinely good at weaving the contemporary into fiction. There was more sophistication in this plot line, some double bluffs, but despite the blips, I remained confident.

But it’s not as straight forward as that: the name that appears on the list is actually an alias he used nearly thirty years ago when he was a rookie recruit sent into Russia to exfiltrate a chemical weapons scientist. Spanning London, Russia and Dubai, Judas 62 is an old school espionage thriller that aficionados of the genre will love! 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.Having made several working visits there, I’ve always felt that Dubai would make an excellent location for a thriller, for in real life the city is awash with intelligence officers from the West, Iran, Israel, Russia and other parts of the Middle East. This all hits way too close to home for Kite because in 1993, when he was still a student operative, Kite was sent to the Soviet Union posing as injured operative Peter Galvin who was there to be a language teacher. The back story is hugely turn-the-pageable, making the cliff fall into present day Dubai all the more painful.