Quick Review: ICARUS 17 by Charles Cumming (Hemlock Press/Mysterious Press)

Lachlan Kite’s latest mission is a little closer to home…

Lachlan Kite should have left fieldwork behind by now.

As director of covert intelligence agency Box 88, he’s at the apex of his espionage career. But when Martha Raine – a woman he hasn’t seen in twenty years – begs for his help, Kite finds himself back in the game, racing to avert disaster.

Kite must find Martha’s son, Max, who vanished in Athens with his girlfriend, Yasmine. But the couple aren’t just missing, they’re running for their lives. Two rival agencies are hunting them, both with orders to kill on sight.

Max and Yasmine are carrying a dizzying secret, one which could pull apart the foundations of the Middle East for a generation. If Kite fails to save them, the costs – both personal and professional – will be catastrophic.

In this, the fourth novel in Charles Cumming’s excellent Box 88 series, Lachlan Kite sets out on the hunt for a couple who have gone missing in Greece. While previous books have connected contemporary missions to Kite’s past actions as a spy, in this book, the stakes are far more personal. As expected, this is another gripping, very well-written novel that hooked me from the start.

Kite is still working to keep his marriage on a firm footing, struggling to be present as a husband and father. However, the unsettled international environment, and the shaky relations between the US and UK have put him and Box 88 into the (clandestine) spotlight. But then Martha Raine gets in touch, and Kite’s world becomes that little bit more complicated. For readers who have been following the series from the start, Martha will be a familiar figure from Kite’s past; a first love, forged in the crucible of a first mission. Icarus 17 is, therefore, as much a story about these two characters and their shared past (and present) as it is a race to find Max and Yasmine, and certainly to do so before the other forces who are converging on the runaways get to them.

As usual, Cumming includes plenty of real-world context, which makes the novel feel fresh, clearly situated in the real-world, and sometimes ripped-from-the-headlines. The book opens with a scene that recalls the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, for example, and this informs some of the action and antagonists’ agendas going forward. The author also examines the contemporary situation in the US and Washington, D.C.:

Whole town is getting torn apart by the administration, gets worse every day. Nobody writing anything down for fear it’ll be read by the regime, they don’t want to meet indoors in case there’s an intercept on private conversations, everybody communicates on Signal with messages set to auto-delete. Might as well be living in Beijing. Same atmosphere of paranoia, same sense of neighbour reporting on neighbour while manoeuvring for influence. Guys at Langley don’t know what they can share with the White House in case it makes its way back to the Russians.

Cumming does a great job of unrolling the story gradually, balancing the more personal moments and the action very well. While I read it a breakneck speed, this was due to how hooked I was, as opposed to any rushing on the author’s part. The focus on Kite and Raine does make this novel feel a bit different to the previous books in the series, but it’s all the better for it — we learn more about Kite, who he is, and what motivates him. The author has always been great at building and developing his characters, and Icarus 17 showcases this skill with both returning characters and also new ones — Max and Yasmine feel fully-formed and three-dimensional from the get-go, for example.

I’ve mentioned before on the site that I been a fan of the author’s work since I read an ARC of Typhoon (2008), which remains one of my favourite books of the past couple of decades. Cumming has been a must-read author ever since, and each new novel so far has been excellent. (I would also recommend watching Plane, the very good movie starring Gerard Butler, which Cumming wrote.)

If you are a fan of spy fiction and/or thrillers more generally, then I would highly recommend all of Cumming’s novels; he has a number of short series as well as standalone books, so there is plenty to choose from. I can’t wait for the author’s next book — be it another Box 88 story, or something else entirely.

Charles Cumming’s Icarus 17 is out now, published by Hemlock Press in the UK and The Mysterious Press in North America.

Also on CR: Reviews of Box 88, Judas 62, Kennedy 35, Typhoon, The Trinity Six, A Foreign Country, A Colder War, and The Man Between