COLD SUNSET

A British travel writer turned hapless double agent is assigned to extricate a fellow two-way spy from the Soviet Union.

Set in 1964 at the height of the Cold War, the novel opens in Santa Monica, where Gabriel Dax meets with the elderly poet F.T. Falkner, a one-time member of British intelligence. The old poet knows that a former colleague from Bletchley Park peddled secrets to the Soviets during World War II. In this third volume of Boyd’s offbeat series, Dax must trade the sunny clime and gastronomical treats of Southern California to confront the newly exposed traitor Angus Fairford in Indianapolis; otherwise, the assignment seems easy enough. But things get complicated when Dax returns to England, where he continues his on-and-off affair with his shifty boss, Faith Green. This puts him in the sights of a gunman targeting Dax for killing the gunman’s brother—a sniper who had President Kennedy in his sights in Berlin. The action shifts to Moscow, where Dax meets up with his KGB handler, Varvara Suvorina, who acts oddly desperate. Here Dax runs into unexpected obstacles extricating Kit Caldwell, an MI6 hero who’d infiltrated the KGB while being honored as a prize defector. Though no one is as obsessed with appearances as Dax (he describes a woman’s “short-jacketed, carbon-black hopsack suit with a wide Peter Pan collar and black suede square-toed shoes”), his inward view is far less revealing. “How had this happened to him?” he asks himself. “What dark, grim swerve had his life taken?” A master storyteller in multiple genres, Boyd here employs a classic chronological approach, eschewing the usual time jumps to create the smoothest and breeziest of reads—one full of surprising turns and personalities.

An enjoyable seriocomic romp through the 1960s spy wars that leaves readers hoping for another installment.