Bos 88 by Charles Cumming

January 13, 2024 0 Comments

An eerie prologue sets the scene for this fast-paced thriller where the worlds of the past and present collide.

The year is 1989. The Berlin Wall has collapsed and the Cold War is ending. But a new secret war is heating up. The infamous Anglo-American spying agency BOX 88 is hot on the trail of an Iranian terrorist with ties to the tragic Lockerbie bombing. They enlist Scot Lachlan Kite, recently graduated from an elite boarding school, to be their inside man. He's sent to France where he gets close to the family of a high profile Iranian businessman in order to gain intelligence that may lead to exposing the terrorist.

Kite is soon kidnapped and brought into captivity. The Iranians seem ruthless and will stop at nothing to get what they want. Bos88 They know that if they can't bring him out alive they will lose their only source of information on the man they want to expose. But it will require him to revisit a dark past, reopen old wounds and reconnect with people he had hoped never to see again.

Charles Cumming is fast becoming a name that can be trusted to deliver cutting edge espionage fiction. His plots are tight, they move at pace and he delivers on the details of how real spies work in a way that will remind you of authors like John le Carre and Ken Follett.

The thing that spoils this novel a little is the lack of a character development in the main protagonist, Lachlan Kite. He's resourceful and likeable enough but he doesn't develop any further as a person as the story progresses. That said, he's a good fit for his role and I would definitely read more of him in the future.