The Cold War may be over, but lingering secrets about spies, traitors and government coverups fire the pages in Charles Cumming's intelligent and briskly paced "The Trinity Six."
If you haven't read this British author, here's the scoop:
Critics have been unabashed in their praise of his novels, including last year's brilliantly concocted "Typhoon." The action took place in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the late '90s, just before Hong Kong was turned over to Chinese rule.
"The Trinity Six" is Cumming's fourth novel, and comparisons with John le Carre and Len Deighton continue to gild his reputation as a premier writer of espionage thrillers.
In this novel, Cumming riffs on Britain's biggest real-life spy scandal and its most notorious double agent, Kim Philby. Philby ran the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring, which passed Cold War intelligence to the Soviets beginning in the 1930s. Philby's betrayals went unknown for decades, even as he rose to the top position in British counterintelligence. Eventually, he defected to the USSR, where he died in 1988.
But what if there had been a sixth member of this spy ring⢠What if his existence were known by the British government⢠And what would the government do to anyone who tried to make this embarrassing knowledge public?
Those questions play out in this novel when Sam Gaddis, a London academic, begins research on a book about the Cold War. His online quest for information triggers an alert at MI6.
Bad luck for Gaddis, who's pulled into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with British and Russian agents.
Tales of unassuming civilians dragged into political intrigue where bodies fall like dominoes are nothing new. But, Cumming is a wonderful storyteller who makes you care about Gaddis' fate. You'll feel a part of Gaddis' run for his life in the U.K. and across Europe. It's as if we're dodging government agents with him. And like Gaddis, you'll never feel so alone.
Country hopping and border crossings are a classic espionage novel device, but Cumming makes it all feel fresh.
That includes a darkly atmospheric scene in Vienna's Prater Park, made famous in Graham Greene's master novel "The Third Man" and the iconic 1949 noir film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.
The Cold War is over, but in "The Trinity Six," it's hotter than ever.
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