BOX 88: From the Top 10 Sunday Times best selling author comes a new spy action crime thriller: Book 1

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The story takes you from the Lockerbie bombing to the South of France, the story flows effectively and really draws you in from start to finish. Cumming presents Lachlan equally convincingly whether he is the young man learning his craft or the established spy decades later faced with death.

He finds it very difficult as the time goes by as his friend Xavier could find out and his does not like to dishonour their friendship. I was most pleased to read of the actualité when it came to bugging devices, especially ones which need to transmit over a mile.Whether the story is taking place at an expensive home in France in the 1980s, or a remote hotel in Scotland, or in contemporary London, each scene is excellently crafted and staged. It grabs the reader's attention from the first page and tells a fascinating story a secret intelligence unit, Box 88 and how Lachlan Kite, an impressionable public schoolboy was recruited 30 years ago to help find the perpetrators of the Lockerbie disaster. He was recruited out of a typical English boarding school and as a teenager ended up spying on a controversial figure at the family summer home of his best friend in the south of France.

This is the background to this clever, intricately plotted thriller with what happens to Lockie at eighteen skilfully woven into events after Xavier’s funeral creating a tense narrative. However, we quickly learn that Box 88 is the name of a top secret subset of MI6 and the CIA in joint collaboration. I have never read an espionage book before but if they are as good as this one I will certainly read more of them. The main body of the book fleshes out what happened on his holiday, something which I found quite fascinating. The tragic Lockerbie murders are the background with the shadowy and controversial figures behind it being of immense interest to Box88.It’s not just the events, though: Cumming is able to bring each of the settings to life brilliantly, without over-describing or spoon-feeding the reader.

In both time frames he regrets the duplicity which threatens the integrity of his romantic relationships but he is also a quick-thinking pragmatist with the greater good in mind. The events and tragedy of that summer and his mission is to have an indelible impact on his life and future, having repercussions through the years that leave him with a burden of guilt that is to affect his friendship with Xavier and the Bonnard family. At the centre of the novel is Lachlan Kite, recruited at 18 as a member of Box 88, the super- secret organisation operating outside the remit of MI5 and MI6. Kite is tasked with gathering intelligence on a mysterious Iranian businessman implicated in the tragic Lockerbie bombing.Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). It is here that Kite meets the charismatic Iranian politician, Ali Eskandarian, while on holidays with Xavier and his family in their luxury villa.