The Hidden Man

September 28, 2015
First published in the U.K. in 2003, bestseller Cumming’s enjoyable second novel falls short of the high standard of his later spy thrillers such as 2012’s A Foreign Country. MI5 agent Stephen Taploe is investigating Russian mobster Viktor Kukushkin, who he suspects is laundering crime syndicate money through Libra,
a popular London nightclub. Mark Keen, a manager at Libra, seems unaware of the money laundering. Mark is the oldest son of Christopher Keen, who worked for more than 20 years as an MI6 agent and is now employed by the security company Divisar Corporate Intelligence. Because Christopher abandoned his wife and family years before, another son, Ben, hates his father. But after Christopher is killed, Ben and Mark get pulled into the world of international espionage while searching for their father’s murderer. Cummings fans should be prepared for a rushed ending and a cast of characters who are almost uniformly unlikable. Agent: Luke Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit.

November 1, 2015
Cumming, who has written brilliantly about the Great Game (A Colder War, 2014), has also written about the triple-A game of private security firms (A Spy by Nature, 2007). This one begins with the murder of a onetime MI6 star essentially sent down to the minors of private security. His two sons, Ben and Mark, seeing that police have very little to go on, decide to investigate. But neither is a cop or a spook; Ben is an artist, and Mark is an executive with a glitzy London nightclub that is expanding to New York and Moscow and is under investigation by MI5 for laundering Russian Mafia money. The brothers are fed information and disinformation by a retired CIA agent and by MI6, and their realization that everyone seems to be lying to them is long in coming. Although the novel begins in a leisurely fashion, emphasizing careful character development, the pace picks up dramatically with fascinating bits concerning Russian organized crime and dueling narratives about the Yanks and the Brits during Russia's invasion of Afghanistan. Another solid effort from an established espionage star.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)