Icarus 17 by Charles Cumming

Published by The Mysterious Press on July 7, 2026

In the fourth novel of Charles Cummings’ BOX 88 series, Lachlan Kite’s past catches up with him. Just before Martha Raine’s wedding in 2001, he had a last fling with her. The sex must have been good because Kite proposed to her the next morning, asking her to call off her wedding. But Martha knew that Kite was married to his job and would never give her the full and undivided attention she craved, so Kite and Martha went their separate ways.

Martha had a son and daughter before getting divorced in 2022. Meanwhile, Kite married a woman who was more tolerant of his need to divide his attention between his job and his family. Sadly for him, Kite’s wife is getting a bit weary of his insistence that saving the world from tyrants and terrorists is a worthier use of his time than hanging out with her. Such is life.

The story begins in 2018, when Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. His killers later torture and murder Marc Chevalier because they believed he would expose kickbacks in the construction of NEOM, the city-of-the-future brainchild of Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Back in the present, Kite is meeting Martha for dinner in London at her request when he learns that a shooter has killed people near his home in Sweden. Kite rushes back home, where he offers to retire so he can stay home and keep his family safe. His wife knows that retirement is not in the cards.

Martha reappears in Kite’s life when her son Max disappears. Kite uses his position at BOX 88 (a hybrid, off-the-books intelligence agency that combines resources of the US and UK) to search for Max. He discovers that Max has disappeared with his girlfriend, Yasmine, who seems to be using a fake identity. The reader, like Kite and Max, will wonder who she might really be. The answer is surprising.

Much of the novel follows Max and Yasmine as they flee from two competing teams of people who want to capture or kill Yasmine. In true thriller fashion, the young lovers stay a step ahead of the pursuit. In due course, Max and the reader learn why Yasmine is on the run. Hint: it has something to do with the death of Chevalier.

The rest of the novel follows Kite and Martha, who are a step behind Max and Yasmine. Their journey begins in Greece and moves to Albania before a final confrontation occurs in Sarajevo. Charles Cumming adds enough local color in each location to give the story a strong sense of atmosphere.

Yasmine’s predicament is unlikely but not nearly as implausible as the plots of most modern thrillers. The technology and tradecraft Kite uses to track down Yasmine and Max is fun. Kite’s characterization gains some depth, thanks to the tension caused by his competing relationships with his wife and Martha. The story moves with the pace of a thriller, placing Max and Yasmine in danger and giving Kite ample cause for worry about their fate.

The story gives a nod to current events, including an astute analysis (from a British perspective) of the American Right and its reaction to Obama (“Because of Obama you get Breitbart and the odious Bannon, as well as the attendant horrors of Fox News, Hannity, Tucker Carlson and so on. From there it is a very short journey indeed to Donald J. Trump.”). Apart from occasional commentary, the story is not overtly political, so open-minded espionage fans on both sides of the divide should be able to enjoy it. The story is complete and can be read as a standalone, but a teaser at the end will give series fans a reason to await the next installment.

RECOMMENDED

The Last Flight from Moscow by Andie Newton

First published by HarperCollins in Great Britain in 2026; published by One More Chapter on May 7, 2026

The Last Flight from Moscow is a flawed spy novel set in 1959. The story is narrated by Mae Pierce, a 34-year-old woman who spied for OSS during World War II. Her former partner in espionage, Sutton Maxfield, now works for the CIA.

While in the OSS, Mae was captured by the Germans. Sutton rescued her with an assist from Vera, a Russian spy. That anecdote is at the heart of the novel’s theme, which amounts to “no woman left behind.”

Sutton has long been retired. She seems to have had trouble adjusting to conventional life. She plays the numbers, relying on a supposed ability to forsee the winning numbers in advance. Her winnings are sporadic and she's deeply in debt to a criminal organization that will do her harm if she doesn't pay.

With that setup, the rest of the story follows a predictable path. Sutton recruits Mae to travel to Moscow to perform a mission, promising to pay her enough to erase her debt. The US is showcasing the American way of life by building a modern home in Moscow, complete with miracle appliances. The Americans are providing guides (actually models) to demonstrate how dutiful American wives operate fancy stoves.

The mission is to save Khruschev. The CIA has tumbled onto a scheme to assassinate him when he attends the exhibition. Sutton wants Mae and a young “girl spy,” Elaine Holiday, to pose as exhibition guides and keep an eye out for clues to the assassin’s identity. Lacking confidence in girl spies, the CIA has assigned male agents (posing as electricians and such) to do the heavy lifting. Mae and Elaine will be supervised in Russia by CIA Agent Hayden Quaid. 

Sutton asks Mae to train Elaine, although Mae provides little in the way of training as the story progresses. In fact, it wasn’t clear to me that Mae had any training of her own, apart from being told not to be photographed while spying.

In Moscow, Mae discovers that Vera is a chaperone at the exhibition. Vera was a Stalinist when they joined forces to fight the Germans but she might now be working for Khruschev or the Russian mafia. Whether Vera is still loyal to her buddies in the OSS or is now a villain should probably be a key plot point, but Andie Newton’s clumsy handling of the question robs it of any interest. Newton attempts to misdirect the reader as to both Vera's loyalty and the assassin's identity but the reveals are far from surpising. 

We know from history that Khrushchev was not assassinated, but the plot suggests that he would have been ridiculously easy to kill, but for the intervention of the CIA. The assassination plot wraps up with about a third of the novel remaining. Mae returns to the US but Elaine doesn’t.

The rest of the story involves Mae's determination not to leave Elaine behind. Mae's rescue plan depends on her haphazard ability to see numbers before they are revealed. I’m not sure that witchcraft has any place in a serious spy novel, but The Last Flight from Moscow doesn’t tell a serious story.

Mae is addicted to vodka, gambling, and sex, making her a more modern woman than the other guides, including Darla, who proudly represents Pepsi in its efforts to break into the Russian soft drink market. Like Linda Lou and Suzanne and Karen and the other American women, Darla is built on a stereotype. The women show little that might count as believable personalities.

Newton failed to convince me that the book tells a plausible story. Mae repeatedly sneaks out at night, breaking curfew and crossing boundaries into the forbidden parts of Moscow. The American embassy notices but the Russians never seem to spot her. For a seasoned spy, Mae’s tradecraft is nearly nonexistent. She has sensitive conversations with Elaine in their hotel rooms, apparently unaware that well before the 1950s, Russians began bugging hotel rooms where Americans stayed. Yet the Russians never tumble to the fact that Mae is a spy.

There are too many scenes in which Mae describes the butterflies in her stomach when she sees the “dreamy” Quaid, or imagines bedding him before she actually does. Having sex and falling in love with the wrong person is a staple of spy fiction, but dreamy men giving rise to butterflied stomachs is in a different category altogether. Infecting a spy novel with the tropes of a romance novel might be a good formula for fans of romance fiction, so you might like The Last Flight from Moscow if that’s what you’re looking for. Be prepared for dialog like “Shut up and kiss me, damn it.” I was annoyed by those scenes, although I admired Mae’s progressive (for pre-feminist times) approach to coping with horniness.

Mae spends more time obsessing about her Japanese nightgown (she loans it to another model in exchange for a favor) than she devotes to catching the assassin. There are far too many scenes of women discussing fashion, complete with detailed descriptions of hairstyles and shoes. Fashion-conscious readers who wonder what women were wearing in 1959 might be thrilled by this content. I thought it was boring filler that serves only to increase the word count.

In fact, the entire novel is too boring to qualify as a thriller. Nor does it develop the kind of intrigue I desire from a spy novel. Some readers will appreciate the novel’s message of female empowerment in pre-feminist times. To those readers, I give the novel a guarded recommendation. For other spy novel fans, there are better choices on the market.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Spies and Other Gods by James Wolff

Published by Atlantic Crime on April 14, 2026

Spies and Other Gods is already dated. An Iranian living in Paris tells his friend that tourism in Iran “is definitely increasing.” Not so much now.

This is a different kind of spy novel. The protagonist, Aphra McQueen, isn’t the kind of spy typically showcased in espionage fiction. She is a professor specializing in medieval history. For reasons not immediately shared with the reader, she takes a job as a researcher for Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the entity charged with oversight of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

The committee recently installed a complaint system that allows whistleblowers to report concerns about MI6. Aphra is tasked with investigating the first confidential complaint.

Sir William Rentoul is the Head of the Service. He has no use for oversight. His goal is to identify the whistleblower while obstructing Aphra’s investigation. To that end, he assigns Susan, a building escort who keeps visitors from straying into secure areas, to safeguard the files that Susan wants to review.

The file begins with a police report from 2017 that concerns the murder of an exiled Iranian journalist living in the Netherlands. His mutilated body is eventually linked to other murdered Iranians in various cities across Europe, raising the fear that an Iranian assassin has been targeting people living outside the country who are regarded as enemies of the state. The whisteblower’s complaint alleged gross negligence in MI6’s response to the assassinations.

Susan gives Aphra time to read only a few pages before spiriting her off to interviews with staff members who were involved in the botched mission. Rentoul doesn’t expect Susan to get far because “the organisation Sir William runs has decades upon decades of experience in frustrating outsiders intent on getting to the bottom of things.”

Susan learns that MI6 tracked travelers from Iran to the cities in which the assassinations occurred to search for a common pattern. Investigators identified a professor of chemistry at Tehran University (code name CASPIAN) as the potential assassin. The Service identified CASPIAN’s nephew, a 41-year-old MBA student in Paris named Ali, as a potential source of information about CASPIAN.

To avoid a diplomatic kerfuffle with France, MI6 wanted to make its pitch to Ali in the UK. To that end, undercover agents contacted a British-Syrian dentist named Zak who lived with Ali for a time during his childhood. Using a pretext, an agent persuaded Zak to put him in touch with Ali. The agent struck up a long-distance relationship with Ali, ostensibly to gather information about his MBA program, then thanked him by inviting him to attend a soccer game in Manchester, where the recruitment was made. Ali now serves as a paid source of information, not just about his uncle but about the Iranian regime. He is regarded as an intelligence source of high value.

Aphra’s investigation is cut short when Susan plants a file on her, causing Aphra’s immediate dismissal and the threat of an arrest. Aphra has a goal of her own, however, so she continues the investigation by contacting Zak and (on the pretense of being an MI6 operative) persuades Zak to travel with her to Paris so she can meet Ali.

The story follows the twists and turns of Aphra’s investigation and MI6’s attempt to thwart her. At some point, Sir William travels to France to gather information about Aphra and Zak, much to the displeasure of his underlings, who understand the diplomatic difficulty of spying in France without alerting the French authorities. Sir William appears to be in the early stages of dementia, so it isn’t surprising that he botches the job.

James Wolff follows the tradition of John LeCarre’s later novels by painting a picture of British spies (the ones in charge, at any rate) as inept bureaucrats. The story builds suspense as Aphra and Zak execute dangerous plans to find the assassin while Sir William makes bumbling efforts to obstruct them.

Spies and Other Gods isn’t a fast-moving action novel, but Wolff keeps the story moving and spices it with occasional action scenes. The plot dishes out rewarding surprises, both in Aphra’s motivation and in the assassin’s identity.

The story is told by a third-person narrator who seems to be something like the spirit of MI6, or perhaps of the building in which MI6 is housed. “When individuals come together, particularly under the umbrella of an organisation with a distinctive purpose and history, something new comes into being . . . This might be called an organisation’s spirit, or soul, or ethos, or character, or simply its identity.” Perhaps the narrator is a god (“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, or whatever the line is, that’s where you’ll find me,” he says near the story’s end). Whatever the narrator might be, Wolff’s narrative approach adds another layer of interest to the story.

Wolff is a former British intelligence officer. British intelligence has produced some of the smartest spy novelists. Spies and Other Gods is my first encounter with a Wolff novel. I look forward to reading more.

RECOMMENDED

The Cormorant Hunt by Michael Idov

Published by Scribner on January 27, 2026

Of current authors of spy novels, only a handful reside in my first tier. Michael Idov has made that list on the strength of The Collaborators and its sequel, The Cormorant Hunt.

In the first novel, CIA agent Ari Falk made trouble for himself by giving a recording to an open-source intelligence website operated by Alan Keegan. In the recording, veteran CIA agent Rex Harlow confesses that he attempted to rig Russia’s 1996 election and, twenty-five years later, murdered several people who got wind of his dirty tricks. Harlow referred to the operation’s mastermind as the Cormorant.

The story begins with Katya Lisichenko crossing into Estonia from Russia in the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She is detained because records show that she made the same crossing two days earlier. She didn’t, so someone must have been using her name.

The story then shifts to Keegan’s receipt of an email with the subject line “a message for Ari Falk.” Keegan doesn’t know how anyone would know of his connection to Falk, apart from people at the top of the CIA hierarchy. Keegan traces the email to Petra Lorencová, an employee of Radio Free Europe in the Czech Republic. He travels there and confronts Petra, who claims she was paid by an unknown source to send the email. The meeting does not end well for Petra or Keegan.

We next encounter Falk, who is living off the grid in the Republic of Georgia. Worried that he is being framed for Keegan’s fate, Falk decides it is time to run. The current deputy director of operations at the CIA (who owes her job to Falk’s outing of Harlow), Asha Tamaskar, dispatches a Mormon CIA agent, Jim Otterbeck, to find Falk. Otterbeck dislikes Falk but the feeling is mutual. It helps Falk’s cause that Otterbeck is straight-laced while Falk is devious.

The other primary plot element involves Felix Burnham, the “champagne version” of Andrew Tate, an advocate of a silly but popular “men’s rights” movement. Burnham has the “slippery, shape-shifting charisma of a born cult leader.” Burnham’s podcast appeals to insecure young men who blame their problems on women, LGBTQ people, and nonwhite immigrants rather than their own disagreeable personalities.

Burnham’s podcast is, naturally enough, financed by Russia in its never-ending attempt to destabilize progressive western nations. Using those funds, Burnham is “putting together a purpose-built private army.” Tamaskar would like to do something about it, but worries that she will be undermined by the Cormorant.

In addition to Ivov’s ridicule of the men’s rights movement, I appreciated his take on the dangers of the modern world. Falk understands that, thanks to Russia, the left-right distinction is no longer relevant. “The only existential standoff now was between the people who wanted to replace institutions with better institutions and the people who wanted to replace institutions with themselves.”

As was true of the first book, the story is clever. The plot eventually links characters in unexpected ways. While the action moves quickly, Ivov takes time to flesh out secondary characters, assigning credible motivations that are consistent with their actions. While characters take heroic risks for the greater good, I also enjoyed the characterization of the CIA’s hackers as “insufferable geeks who considered themselves God’s gift to the Agency.”

In this second novel, Ivov cements himself as a must-read author for spy novel fans. His prose is clear and forceful, even if he lacks the stylistic brilliance of the genre’s master, John Le Carré. That’s not a knock, because there was only one Le Carré. In his ability to craft credible but exciting plots, reasonably deep characters, and perceptive analyses of world events, Idov is an exceptional spy novelist.

RECOMMENDED

Pariah by Dan Fesperman

Published by Knopf on July 22, 2025

Pariah is built upon the kind of plot that intrigued Hitchcock. A person with no particular connection to international intrigue becomes embroiled in a spy story that threatens his life. Dan Fesperson gives the plot a new spin by making the protagonist something of a loser who does his best spying while drunk.

Hal Knight is not exactly Al Franken, but he’s a comedian/actor who got elected to Congress before he lost his seat because of untoward behavior. While Franken was railroaded over relatively benign conduct that was far too trivial to warrant the loss of his job, Hal engaged in the kind of sexual harassment on a movie set (including the brief exposure of his reproductive organ) that gets people fired.

Hal is hiding in a small island in the Caribbean when the novel begins. He hasn’t checked social media and isn’t aware that he’s been invited by tweet to visit Bolrovia, a small nation that was once part of the Soviet Union. Its dictator, Nikolai Horvatz, is a fan of Hal’s trashy movies — the kind that depend on jiggling breasts to supplement the laughs. Hal has no desire to bring more attention to himself, but a team of CIA agents convince him that he will be serving the nation by accepting the offer and doing a bit of snooping. The CIA has few agents on the ground in Bolrovia because the head of Horvatz’s security service, Branko Sarič, has eliminated most of them.

The CIA knows that Horvatz is up to something nefarious but they aren’t sure what. Hal’s assignment is to keep his eyes open and report what he sees. The chance to serve his country might rehabilitate his image when the public learns of it and, in any event, Hal agrees because he has nothing better to do. Knowing that his phone and computer will be monitored, agents give Hal a notebook with instructions for dropping off his reports in exchange for blank replacement pages.

In Bolrovia, Pavel Lukov is assigned to mind Hal. Lukov has no great love for Horvatz and even less for his boss Sarič, so the reader might feel sorry for him when Hal evades him for enough time to drop off his reports. It seems likely that innocent Lukov will be blamed when events take a wrong turn.

Hal also meets some Americans in Bolrovia who might be involved with Horvatz’s nefarious scheme. Fesperson hides the nature of the scheme for most of the novel so I won’t reveal it. I can say that it is credible and, for a welcome change, doesn’t involve nuclear bombs.

Hal is in over his head, as he demonstrates when he drunkenly sends a message to his ex that he hopes Sarič won’t understand. As the reader might expect, Hal’s mission goes tits up after he learns about Horvatz’s secret plan. At that point, Pariah turns into an action novel as Hal (with the help of CIA agents who go rogue rather than abandoning their asset) scrambles to escape from Bolrovia. Shootouts ensue. Hal’s focus is on not getting shot but he does manage to contribute to the action.

The reader will likely hope that Hal learns something from his disgraced exit from Congress and his foolishly heroic escapades in Bolrovia. One of the novel’s best moments occurs when Hal, delivering a standup comedy performance for Horvatz, embarrasses the dictator in a way that goes over his head. By the time anyone has the nerve to tell Horvatz that he has been made the butt of a joke, Hal is eluding Sarič’s goons and running for his tragically wasted life.

The other memorable moment involves Lukov’s decision to deliver Hal to Sarič or to betray his leader and put his life at risk by helping Hal escape. A good moral dilemma is an essential ingredient of top-notch spy fiction. While Hal’s  actions are driven by self-interest or intoxication, Lukov needs to decide whether he is prepared to make the sacrifices that accompany resistance to a dictator. Fesperman allows the reader to feel all the arbitrary violence that dictators depend upon to control their populations.

Making the protagonist a comedian allows Fesperman to introduce humor into the plot, but comedy is not the novel’s focus. Instead, the life-changing decisions forced upon Hal and Lukov add substance and heart to the story. Fesperman achieves a workable balance of humor and pathos without sacrificing the thrills that spy novel fans crave.

RECOMMENDED