I like a good spy story but I have had very mixed luck with Charles Cumming’s books in the past. First I tried The Trinity Six and I abandoned the book shortly after starting it – a first for me. The narrator of the audiobook did such a poor job, which contributed greatly to the experience.

A while later I tried the first in a trilogy, A Foreign Country, which was a lot better mainly because I read the book rather than listened to it. The narrator was the same as before and I was not going to put myself through that again.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a spy novel and a return is overdue. By default these days I go for the audiobook version as time for sitting down and reading a book is short. This is the start of a new series, so I was hoping for the best.

It gets over the first hurdle – there is a different narrator and he does an impressive, understated job. This is an easy book to listen to.

As for the writing, I started with the impression that Cumming was telling a simpler story, venturing into the less demanding mainstream in the hope of getting more readers. This is not the sort of super-taut, masterfully crafted prose that gets you ordained into the spy-craft high order of Le Carré and Len Deighton, but puts him alongside Mick Herron as a modern-day purveyor of the spy story. The difference, I feel, is that the mainstream is moving towards Herron (what with the upcoming Apple TV+ series based on his Jackson Lamb books) whilst Cumming is trying to manoeuvre himself more into the public consciousness.

Still, the story gets stronger as it goes along and everything is tied up at the end ready for the next instalment.