"A second adventure for amateur spy Gabriel Dax, first seen in Boyd's 2024 novel Gabriel's Moon. It's early 1963, and Dax, a travel writer, is in his Sussex cottage working on his latest book, struggling with emotional baggage and yearning for his MI6 handler and sometime girlfriend, Faith Green. She persuades him to go to Guatemala to check out the popular leftwing leader who is threatening to topple the country's CIA-backed government, but Dax is forced to flee when things go seriously awry."
"He ends up being sent to West Berlin to gather intelligence on a possible assassin, whose arrival in West Germany just before the visit of US president John F Kennedy may not be coincidental. Beautifully crafted, with echoes of le Carre, Greene and Forsyth, this is a superb evocation of a vanished world, seen through the eyes of a relatably hapless accidental hero."
"Hallett's latest centres on that staple of British social life, the pub quiz, and like its predecessors it's told in emails, WhatsApp messages, texts and transcripts. We know from the start that things haven't gone well for pub landlords Sue and Mal Eastwood: their nephew is pitching a true crime documentary to Netflix, promising intrigue, tension, betrayal, deception and murder."
Gabriel Dax, an amateur spy and travel writer in early 1963, lives in a Sussex cottage while wrestling with emotional baggage and yearning for MI6 handler Faith Green. Sent to Guatemala to check a leftwing leader threatening a CIA-backed government, Dax is forced to flee when the mission collapses. He is reassigned to West Berlin to investigate a suspected assassin arriving just before President John F Kennedy's visit, blending Cold War tension with a hapless accidental-hero perspective. A separate story follows pub landlords Sue and Mal Eastwood as a consistently winning quiz team prompts cheating accusations and the discovery of a body, with the mystery unfolded through emails, WhatsApp messages, texts and transcripts and driven by misdirection and clever plotting.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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