CAPTAIN GREY'S GAMBIT

You thought you knew secret agents, but you may have thought wrong.

It’s 1803, and Captain Thomas Grey is on urgent business for His Majesty’s Office of the Admiralty and Marine Affairs. Captain is a courtesy title gained during Grey’s time in the Royal Marines, from which he was recruited to work intelligence. Britain finds itself alone in Western Europe, defying the imperialistic encroachment of Napoleon Bonaparte, and Grey finds himself alone in India, relaying dispatches between diplomats and military officers. Things go smoothly early on, and most of Grey’s first interactions involve the exchanging of pleasantries and niceties (tea first and foremost) that seemingly distinguish an early-19th-century spy from later counterparts. In the second book of his Captain Grey series, following Hold Fast (2021), Gelernter continues to distinguish his character from his literary influences, chief among them Ian Fleming’s James Bond, with deliberate flourishes like a sense of honor that means Grey must allow his enemies a chance to live, often at risk to his own life, and a penchant for gaming—but in place of Bond’s baccarat, Grey plays chess, which is absolutely central to this volume. Grey is required to travel undercover to Frankfurt to retrieve would-be defector Joseph Leclerc, secretary to Bonaparte and an invaluable prize to the British cause, from a chess tournament. Consequently, multiple chess matches are recorded in their entirety, move by move, in a gambit that risks losing some readers but that's easy enough to ignore. Pay more attention to the many rich historical details that populate the novel with obvious care. Sometimes Grey can seem too good to be true, and solutions to problems are presented rather than solved, but such is the way of things with superspies.

A romantic dalliance with the past via an international man of mystery.