Kennedy 35 is the third of Cumming’s BOX 88 series of novels featuring the secret Anglo-American spy organisation that exists in the fringes of the intelligence services.
In the present day, Lachlan ‘Lockie’ Kite is the head of the UK division. We find him hoping for some rapprochement in his marriage to Isobel who has for time being headed home to Sweden with their young daughter. But Kite quickly has to return to London when he gets contacted by a former school colleague of his who needs to speak with him.
An American journalist has got hold of the memoirs of former French intelligence serviceman, and is planning to reveal all in his “Woodstein” podcast.
This is a novel that is set against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide, and the immediate following. The book actually opens with a potted history of what happened before we get into the story itself. Once more, we travel back in time to see what happened when Kite was part of a BOX 88 team enlisted to capture an escaped figure central to the genocide. He and his equally culpable girlfriend are in Senegal, and he flies to Dakar taking his girlfriend Martha as cover.
They are to meet up with a local contact who turns out to be a French sometime photojournalist who has some curious behavioural issues – perhaps PTSD, perhaps because of the dangerous side effects of the anti-malarial drug lariam which he is taking.
The operation in Dakar very much goes sideways, and the outcome will have consequences decades later, with some of the characters who escaped the net back in the 90s now wealthy and fairly powerful themselves. Meanwhile both Kite and Martha’s names might be made public, so for the first time in many years, Kite is trying to reach Martha who is now happily married and living in New York. But he can’t reach her.
This is another great entry in the BOX 88 series, and the complexities and culpabilities of those who did nothing while so many hundreds of thousands died are explored here – not least the behaviour of the French government.
What I enjoy about these novels is that while they can be read as standalone titles, there is very much a through line telling the ongoing stories of key characters, and things are definitely ratcheting up in some of those stakes. I eagerly await the next book in the series.