Espionage literature underwent a necessary transformation to adapt to current times. Today's international political scene shares a parallel role between the physical space of countries and borders and that abyss of the network in which all political or economic interest acquires an unpredictable dimension between currents of opinion and threats of cyberattacks. Essential authors of the genre in its most fruitful time as John Le Carre , Tom Clancy or even Frederick forsyth, still have a pull with twentieth century resources. But any new author seeking to deliver a good up-to-date spy story must face the remote end of the cold war toward a new latent conflict between the real and the virtual.
And this is how David baldacci y Daniel Silva and Charles Cumming himself have understood that they must start from the aforementioned combination, with a greater plot richness and with a sophistication to end up keeping the reader in tension towards surprising endings.
Cumming leads us to 85 Albert Embankment Street to enter the MI6 offices, where the most difficult of contingencies arises around a mole that endangers the British intelligence services and by extension the difficult political balance world.
In a world of intelligence where each of the agents of each body knows great secrets and resources, the mere suspicion that one of them may be playing two-way turns everything upside down. As on other occasions, one of the most controversial agents, Thomas Kell (whose labor misery we already learned about in the previous novel of this saga) takes the controls of an investigation to discover the mole.
The tension is served. Because in the underground movements of the mole appear traps and unsuspected dangers. The mole knows a lot about the organization and is supported by his particular sponsor in the mission to destabilize everything. The more than possible murder of one of the MI6 commanders, who died in an accident that seems to leave no room for suspicion, initiates an investigation headed by a Thomas Kell willing to do anything to reconcile himself with the organization.
We travel half the world, with roundtrip routes from the Middle East to the West. Istanbul was always that critical enclave between two opposing worlds and from there a plot with that aftertaste of conspiracy from other times mixed with the most modern resources branches off.
Thomas Kell is discovering how the case is also linking with his personal future, with his decline as an agent. Only, whoever you pull the strings does not know that Thomas is going to do his best, he does not intend to leave a single fringe loose. And he will draw his own plan to the limit to ensure that the world does not succumb to one of the greatest recent risks ...
You can now buy the novel Complot in Istanbul, the new book by Charles Cumming, here: