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Cracking third spy thriller in a popular series.
(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK)
This is a well-written and thoroughly-researched novel about the Rwandan Genocide and its aftermath.
Set mainly in Senegal, London and to some extent New York and Paris as well as other locations, this is a story about how an attempt to deliver justice for the victims of the nightmare of 1994 becomes a smaller nightmare in its own right, in 1995, leading to a significant accomplice escaping justice and being used by a (French) traitor to help him build a huge fortune by laundering money for terrorists. 28 years later, an opportunity arises to put things right, but not without more danger and a further terrible sacrifice. The concluding adventure sequence delivers justice in a satisfying way, but the leading character is left on the cusp of seizing personal disaster from his professional triumph. (This makes the reader wish that someone would hit him briskly on the shins with a cricket bat, but it no doubt sets the scene for the next volume in the series.)
The French government (especially in 1994, but also that of 2023) does not come out of this at all well and it’s very hard to argue, from the evidence in the public domain, that this is in any way undeserved. The DGSE are portrayed as making the CIA look like boy scouts and that might not be too far off the mark, either.
The central premise of the BOX 88 series, though, is a joint Anglo-American intelligence agency acting below the radar. In any kind of real-world practice this might be a recipe for internecine warfare rather than successful cooperation. In actual fact, there was a vitally-important joint UK-USA photo-reconnaissance organisation during WWII, which a Colonel Roosevelt (the president’s son) recommended, on the eve of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, be wound up because the Limey-faggot RAF was in charge! And it is unlikely that BOX 88 could operate “below the radar” in a world where a US Senator on the intelligence and foreign relations committee can be found in possession of a closet full of unexplained gold bars and carrier-bags of banknotes!
But, as a literary device, the Anglo-American BOX 88 with America as by far the senior partner allows the DGSE to be the not-quite enemy in a way that would be enormously offensive to a large swathe of pro-EU opinion if BOX 88 were British! Which is all good fun.
Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming is published by Harper Collins on the 26th of October 2023.
