Charles Cumming writes a remarkable espionage thriller that is the extraordinary coming of age of Lachlan 'Lockie' Kite in the late 1980s, with a narrative that shifts back and forth in time to allow the reader to compare and contrast the nature of espionage and spycraft in two markedly different eras. Close to his alcoholic father, young Lockie is devastated and griefstricken at his death. He is not so close to the chilling and distant beauty that his mother, and plays an instrumental part in helping to run their Scottish hotel. Despite not being able to afford it, his mother wangles him a place at an elite public school, Alford College, in England, leaving a lost and rootless Kite having to come to terms with this new milieu, the divisions of social class and its hierarchies, the male only boys culture, with some beaks (teachers) rather keen on touching their young charges.

He eventually settles down, becoming friends with the wealthy Xavier Bonnard, accepted by and staying with Xavier's family in their various homes in the holidays. It is Xavier's casual invitation to spend the summer of 1989 at their villa in the South of France, where they will be joined by his Iranian godfather, Ali Eskandarian, that leads to Kite's unlikely recruitment to the highly secretive Anglo-American spy agency, Box 88. Eskandarian is a person of interest in the Lockerbie disaster which claimed so many lives, and there are rumours another atrocity is in the pipeline. The events and tragedy of that summer and his mission is to have an indelible impact on his life and future, having repercussions through the years that leave him with a burden of guilt that is to affect his friendship with Xavier and the Bonnard family. Decades later, a significant girlfriend from his past, Martha Raine, phones him to let him know that the heavy drinking Xavier has committed suicide.

Lockie attends Xavier's funeral, he is being investigated by MI5 for being a spy, only to be abducted by the Iranian Intelligence Service, who wish to interrogate him on the events of that 1989 summer, and at stake is the life of his pregnant wife and their unborn child. Cumming skillfully weaves Lockie's present day dilemmas with the past, his personal history and what happened that fateful summer in the South of France. The highlight for me was the human story of Kite, to all intents and purposes still a naive schoolboy, drawn into the dark, intense, pressurising, dangerous and fraught world of global espionage. He wants to please, he wants to help his country, and help avoid another terrorist incident, but he has only the tiniest of glimpses of the fast changing picture, left in the dark about what is going on. He finds his loyalties torn, and guilt accumulating when it comes to the Bonnard family, and in the midst of it all, is the flowering of his romantic relationship with Martha. This will appeal to all those who love quality espionage fiction. Many thanks to HarperCollins for an ARC.

Box 88 is a brilliant spy thriller told across to timelines .Lockie Kite works for a very secret intelligence unit ,he attends an old friends funeral when he is kidnapped .The story goes back to when Lockie was 18 and first recruited to spy when staying with his friend and his family in their villa in the South of France .Box 88 is such a clever story full of surprises the descriptions are brilliant I felt I was there with Lockie A very enjoyable read I hope to read more about Lockie and his work .Many thanks to the Publisher the Author and NetGalley for my copy in return for an honest review .

This is a very exciting tale of international espionage, entitlement, wealth and privilege.
The story takes us on a journey into the past and also the present exploring an event that happened thirty years earlier.
A well written book, with animated characters. However, what spoiled the book for me was the unacceptable casual use of Racist language. Referring to the French as Frogs is antiquated and offensive, and was unnecessary in this book

I’ve read and enjoyed a few of Charles Cumming’s books, so I was delighted when this popped up for request shortly after I’d finished the second Thomas Kell story. This is a standalone novel, introducing a new cast of characters, although I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them appear in later books – they’re interesting enough that I’d be happy to meet them again.
Among those is the main protagonist, Lockie Kite, who’s recruited to work for an intelligence unit that’s unknown to all but a handful of people outside it. It seems plausible to me that there are (or have been) outfits like BOX 88 that are so secret even the rest of the security services don’t know they exist. And if there aren’t, there probably should be. It strikes me that it must be hard to write good spy fiction without it seeming too outlandish (or equally too dull, which is probably nearer to the truth for most analysts) or clichéd. Here, as in Cumming’s other novels, there’s a mixture of the mundane and heart-stopping which rings true.
Telling the story partly in the present day and partly at the outset of Kite’s career allows us to see how advances in technology have changed the nature of espionage – from the old-school dead drops and chalk marks of the late 1980s to today’s GPS tracking and electronic bubbles. I like that a number of the characters behaved in a way that made it possible that they were agents too. Maybe one or more of them was indeed also undercover and that might be revealed in a future story. I really enjoyed this and look forward to reading more of Charles Cumming’s books.

A neat take on a spy novel. Not normally a fan of “flashback” books (or films) where every other chapter takes you back so many years but for me, as the book went on, so the relevance of this became more integrated to the story. Spanning 30 years of Lachlan Kites espionage career as he first becomes involved as an 18 year old school boy, the characters are established and their individual roles fleshed out whilst in the present day Lachlan is kidnapped and his pregnant wife held hostage. The scene setting from school to holidaying in the South of France with his wealthy school chums family outlines the reasons for his recruitment and leads somewhat unexpectedly to his current predicament. It’s as well others have taken an interest in Box 88. The story and its conclusion nicely sets up a potential next book and has put the author on my must read list.

‘Box 88’ is a superbly written spy thriller. Not only does the plot intrigue and the pace remain appropriately frenetic throughout but Charles Cumming is also able to create living breathing characters whose actions are wholly plausible, quite an ask of any writer immersed in an enigmatic world of espionage.
At the centre of the novel is Lachlan Kite, recruited at 18 as a member of Box 88, the super- secret organisation operating outside the remit of MI5 and MI6. In this novel we are taken back to his teenage years during which, whilst always remaining an outsider of sorts, he attends an elite boarding school (a thinly disguised Eton). Here, he is befriended by Xavier Bonnard whose parents have a villa in the south of France and asked to report to Box 88 on their Iranian guest, Ali Eskandarian, whom they suspect of funding the Lockerbie bombing. Cumming’s skill in depicting place is such that the reader can instantaneously smell the furniture polish of school and the concrete dank of an underground carpark, as well as imagining the heat of the Provencal stone and the plastic sheeted floor of a probable torture chamber.
Cumming presents Lachlan equally convincingly whether he is the young man learning his craft or the established spy decades later faced with death. In both time frames he regrets the duplicity which threatens the integrity of his romantic relationships but he is also a quick-thinking pragmatist with the greater good in mind.
This is an excellent read. The final paragraphs of the novel suggest that Charles Cumming has more adventures in store for Lachlan. There will be plenty of us keen to learn of them!
My thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollinsUK for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

If you love spy thrillers you'll love Box 88. Extremely well written and unputdownable. An excellent read for a thriller fan!

An old-fashioned spy story with a modern take. I really enjoyed it after the first couple of chapters when there seemed to be an emphasis on code names which were not very relevant to the rest of the story. The past and present stories meshed well and it was interesting to find out more about the main character and about his first assignment as a spy.
I felt that the characters were well drawn and the different groups of the characters were relevant to each other. I wanted to keep reading and to move through the story. Some of the main character's early attempts to carry out assigned tasks were very tense.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, found it a very satisfying read and highly recommend it.

Undoubtedly well written, this suspenseful novel will go down really well with anyone who enjoys a good spy thriller.
I thought it started excellently and kept up the pace to the end.

An excellent spy thriller which opens in 2020 when our protagonist, Lachlan Kite attends a funeral of an old school friend and our antennae should start twitching when he accepts a lift from someone he met at the funeral. The timeline then shifts between the Summer when he was 18 and recruited to spy on his hosts in a villa in the South of France following the Lockerbie bombing – and present day.

Brilliantly constructed, great characters and Lockie’s recruitment by his mentor at 18 had me recalling the recruitment of the famour spies when they were at Cambridge.

Thank you to the author, publishers and NetGalley for providing an ARC via my Kindle in return for an honest review.

A riveting novel, that had me on the edge of my seat until I was able to read it, it took two days. I am assuming there are many more books by this author, and I want to read them all, judging by this one. Recommended.

I enjoy the occasional thriller featuring daring deeds undertaken by agents working for MI6 or the CIA. The stories tend to be complex puzzles you have to be on your game to unravel and usually told in a manner that ensures you have to pay very close attention to the detail. I’ve always found John le Carré’s novels to be impenetrable (I can’t even track the films or television adaptations of his books) but I’ve grown to rely on the scribblings of Charles Cumming - I’ve found his style of espionage much more digestible.

We’re first introduced to Lachlan Kite when he attends the funeral of his one-time close friends. We know little of him other than the fact that he works for a secret group collected from former members of British and American intelligence agencies. The team call themselves Box 88 and their aim is to ensure that the conflicting goals of whatever government happens to be in power do not prevent the ‘right’ sort of operations being undertaken. But soon Kite finds himself in peril and with no means of communicating with his team.

As Lachlan fights for his own survival members of Box 88 are frantically searching for him. Can they find him in time? As this plays out we start to learn in flashback of Kite’s background and how he was recruited into this exclusive and mysterious group. We begin to learn how events of the past have created the challenge he now faces, and what a story it is. We track events from his days as a bright student at a posh public school to a daring escapade accompanying the family of his close friend to their villa in the South of France, as he awaits his A Level exam results.

It’s brilliantly done: the pace and structure of the story and the character development (of all the leading players) drew me in totally. It's a great story, brilliantly told. I could hardly put this one down and totally raced through the whole thing. I think this is the author’s best book to date and even better it appears to be the start of a series featuring Lachlan Kite. Personally, I cant wait to get my hands on book 2. Perhaps my top read of the year so far.

With the exception of Mick Herron (who of course writes a very different type of spy novel), I cannot think of anyone who can currently match Charles Cumming in this genre. He is a wonderful storyteller, creates characters who are both interesting and fallible and produces seamless and believable plots. Box 88 is no exception and is the first in what I expect will be a new series of books featuring Lachlan Kite, who in 1988 is recruited prior to going to University from a very-thinly disguised Eton, to join a top secret organisation, the aforementioned Box 88 which appears to be the barely legitimate child of a covert relationship between MI6 and the CIA.

Lachlan is spending the summer holidays with a friend and his family at a very exclusive villa in the South of France and his role is to report on the activities of an Iranian businessman who is also staying with the family and may be implicated in the Lockerbie bombing.

The action moves back and forth in time between the events at the villa and the present when Lachlan has been kidnapped by a group of Iranians who want to know exactly what happened back in 1988 whilst at the same time, a small group of MI5 agents who have been charged with finding out more about Box 88, are searching for the missing Lachlan. As always, the author maintains the tension from the very start but without resorting to the mass shoot-outs or prolonged torture scenes used by lesser writers. This makes the violence, when it does occur, far more realistic and believable. In 1988, the narrative tension evolves around the “Will Lachlan’s amateur spying be found out or not?” question whereas in the present day it’s “Will Lachlan get away or not from his kidnappers?” and I really liked the way that the author maintained the tension in both scenarios whilst jumping from chapter to chapter between the different time zones.

So overall, this was another first-class novel from Mr Cumming. If I had one criticism, I am not sure that as yet I have bought into the concept of Box 88 and in particular exactly what they were supposed to be doing and who was funding their incredibly lavish headquarters in London (Slough House, they certainly weren’t!). But perhaps Mr. Cumming will enlighten me in future books and it certainly didn’t spoil my enjoyment.

Highly recommended and my thanks to the publishers, Harper Collins and to Netgalley for an ARC in return for an honest review.

If you are a writer this is one of those novels you dearly wish you had written yourself. Superbly paced with brilliant, sharply crafted characters and a gripping back and forth narrative. Lachlan Kite (who sounds hot as well as clever and extremely likeable!) has spent decades working for "Box 88" a top secret international spy agency. He was recruited out of an elite boarding school and as a teenager put to work that very summer - spying on a controversial figure at the family summer home of his best friend in the south of France. The consequences and fallout are devastating for the family. Back in the present day when Kite is kidnapped and tortured he is given an ultimatum - reveal what really happened that summer in France or both he, his wife and their unborn child will be murdered. This is a slick, gripping, sexy thriller. I absolutely adored it and look forward to the follow up. Bravo Mr Cumming!

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Charles Cumming, Harper Collins UK and Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read and give my unbiased opinion of this book.
This is my first novel by Charles Cumming and I am now addicted to his work. I found the beginning quickly heldmy interest and this continued throughout the book. I read for most of the night and finished the novel in less than 24 hrs. The plot was well written and researched and the characters were described in such detail that I felt I knew them intimately.
I now want to read everything Charles Cumming has written and will look out for his next novel.

I loved this book and couldn't put it down. A well-written and gripping thriller, with great characters, and I hope to read more about Lachlan Kite. The switch between different time periods was dealt with well, and in a very natural way. I wouldn't ordinarily read a "spy thriller" but this book may just have converted me.

Box 88 by Charles Cumming was intense and gripping. The story never faltered and the characters had great depth and humanity (& often cruelty too!) I hate it when a book’s ending leaves me up in the air but this time I’m delighted as I’m confident there’s more to come! The storyline is believable and consistent and the evolving skills of Lachlan initially and now Cara is a great opening for a series. This would translate well to a mini series Loved it all Five stars for this one as it answers enough questions in this book to satisfy yet leaves enough open to create anticipation

Lachlan Kite a senior intelligence officer , but for a clandestine group called Box 88.

The story is about Kite's enrolment whilst at public school and his first active assignment when on holiday with the family of his friend in France. While that is proceeding through the book he has been kidnapped and relating his first experience as spy to his captors.

The novel is constantly moving backwards and forwards in time which is sometimes a bit confusing .There is plenty of action for the aficionados of the James Bond genre, but not enough of the dark seedy in the shadows type of spy like Smiley. A good book to while away the hours ,enough to keep one interested but not one to challenge .

This is a standard spy novel with an involved storyline and an expected ending. Box 88 is an under the counter espionage group working without the constraints of bodies such as the CIA and MI5 although presumably funded unofficially by these bodies. Lachlan Kite, known as Lockie, is the son of a Scottish hotel owner sent to an elite English boarding school where he comes to the attention of a master who is also working for Box 88. His lack of family structure makes him a natural for Box 88. One summer he is invited to stay with the family of a school friend in the south of France. The friend’s father and contacts are of interest to the spy masters so Lachlan is recruited at this young age to be a spy. That stretches belief somewhat. He becomes a “posh boy pretending to be a ‘normal’ Scottish teenager”. The book lurches without warning between the events of that summer and his need to recall them when being captive to another rogue group years later. That requires the reader to pay close attention and also to separate out the characters from the various official and under the counter groups. The story can be confusing.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and thought the transition between then and now was masterfully handled with the action playing out seemingly in real time in both time points. Although the story of then was being told at least in part under interrogation it did not come across that way and made it flow so much better than if interspersed with lots of questioning and/or torture.
The investigation Kite was embroiled in was almost background to his relationships with the family he was holidaying with, just as it would be for any teen and felt very real.
Information is drip fed to the reader just as to the interrogator and the reveals that happen are all the more enjoyable for it!