It feels like a TV series where they make a character go travel somewhere because the actor is busy on another project and they have to figure out how to work around it. The list represents Russian intelligence officers, military personnel, and scientists living in the West who had been targeted for reprisal assassinations by Moscow. Is he, Martha, or his family in danger of Russian assassins like so many other names on the list who have recently been killed? S., assassinated by Putin's FSB (ex-KGB) agents as a traitor, one of many targets on their Judas List.

The Judas list has such a ring of authenticity as we all know of revenge stories such as Alexei Navalny and Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. It devotes a large portion of the initial half of Judas 62 to the activities that resulted in Kite's spy name being placed on Judas. I haven’t read all of Cumming’s novels, I enjoyed his Thomas Kell Spy Thriller series, particularly ‘A Colder War’ and his take on the Cambridge spy-ring in ‘The Trinity Six’, as well as Box 88, but I think Judas 62 is best I’ve read so far.

It is forbidden to copy anything for publication elsewhere without written permission from the copyright holder. When Evgeny Palatnik, a Soviet defector to the West is murdered in America with Novichok, Kite sets out to avenge him. JUDAS 62 is a lengthy read and one that takes no time for short-cuts or diversions from the task at hand.

Judas 62' involves one of the stars of the series kickoff, Lachlan Kite, as he discovers a pseudonym he'd used in the past is now a name on Russia's 'kill list', also known as the Judas list. S. source for Box 88, the transatlantic counterintelligence and top secret spy agency, named Saul Kaszeta is off for a four-day fishing vacation to Lake Placid in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. It picks up not long after the previous novel ended, with lead protagonist Lachlan ‘Lockie’ Kite, London Head of Box 88 (a secretly funded intelligence organisation working under similar remits to the CIA and MI6) learning about the death in America of a scientist.

He had, however, been tracked down despite the safety measures put in place, and a Russian assassin had managed to deliver a fatal dose of Novichok. I said it before in an update, but it's far too slow to be a thriller and the story is mundane - getting a scientist out of Russia to the West, so he can make his horrible weapons for "us" instead of "them".A Foreign Country, his sixth novel, concerning the disappearance of the first female Chief of MI6, was published in 2012. It’s set in Dubai, a modern-day hotbed of spies and corruption, and a playground for the filthy rich from around the world. The first half of the book is set within that mission, with Kite almost alone in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Russia.