It was a love letter written by one of the more important British spies of the cold war that made Tom Brass realise he had never fully known his mother. The spy in question was John Cairncross, the alleged fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring, whose spycraft also helped the Soviets win the Battle of Kursk and turn the tide of the second world war.
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.