A sequel to his A Foreign Country, Charles Cumming's A Colder War digs deeper into the lives of Britain's disgraced Secret Intelligence Service agent Thomas Kell and his boss Amelia Levene, the first female chief of MI6. When Paul Wallinger, SIS Head of Station in Turkey and Levene's occasional lover, crashes his plane and dies off the coast of Greece, she brings in her trusted friend Kell for an off-the-books investigation. Was womanizer Wallinger with another woman, working one of his assets or leaking secrets to the Soviets? Or was the crash just bad luck?
Kell is in professional no-man's-land while being investigated for an overzealous interrogation. His long, rocky marriage is over. He's desperate to get back in the game. Levene's assignment is his life preserver, "a sign from the God in whom Kell still occasionally believed." A visit to Greece quickly convinces him that Wallinger's death is just one knot in a more elaborate tangle of duplicity among the Soviets and both the SIS and its "cousin," the CIA.
A former MI6 recruit before he began writing fiction, Cumming knows the language and bureaucracy of today's world of digital espionage. Like all good spook noir, A Colder War has plenty of spy slang, with cut-outs, moles, drops, honey traps, one-on-ones and other terms of the tradecraft permeating the narrative. This masterful, globetrotting novel is a smart representation of an underground world we might have thought disappeared with the Cold War--until Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and deadly drones came along. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.