KENNEDY 35

A veteran secret agent tracks Rwandan war criminals.

A preliminary "Note on the Rwandan Genocide," chilling in its dispassionate description of horrifying events, summarizes the ghastly events of 1994. The novel proper opens a year later, as veteran CIA officer Michael Strawson and French war reporter Philippe Vauban discuss the tragic aftermath and the outrageous fact that the engineer of the carnage, Augustin Bagaza, “the butcher of Kigali,” is living in Dakar in comfort at 35 Rue Kennedy with “his Congolese whore.” Flash forward to Paris, 2022: MI6 is on the trail of this woman, whom they call “Lady Macbeth.” In the succeeding chapter, “The present day,” Senegalese businessman Eric Appiah is tracking down his old friend, veteran spy Lachlan Kite, who worked under Strawson. Hearing Appiah use the diminutive “Lockie” convinces gallery owner Robin Whitaker to contact his secretive friend on Appiah’s behalf. Appiah’s contact with Kite, who has now married Isobel, a doctor who’s borne him a young daughter, takes Kite and the reader back to the mid-1990s and his initial pursuit of Bagaza and Lady Macbeth with his then-girlfriend, Martha Raine, in tow. As the plot moves again into the present, the search to find and protect Martha provides an engine. Steeped in recent history, Cumming’s third Box 88 novel depicts the international complexities of modern espionage as well as the inseparable intertwining of the political and the personal. Like le Carré and Lawton before him, Cumming is building a modern history through an espionage lens, book by methodical book.  

An intricate espionage thriller that’s both timely and convincing.