KENNEDY 35 is the third novel in Charles Cumming’s intriguing BOX 88 series, featuring Lachlan Kite. Kite is a great modern take on the classic spy hero: tough, resilient and flawed. A scholarship boy who went to one of the most famous public schools in the world. This gives Kite a unique perspective, coming from a semi-ordinary middle class background and thrust into a world of prestige and privilege where he experiences extravagance way beyond his means through his friends. This can at times give him a skewed view, not feeling that he belongs in either world. This is reflected in his personal life and decision making over the course of the series. It also helps Kite to blend in as a spy and think unconventionally as he moves seamlessly between different worlds and lives. After university Kite is recruited into BOX 88, an off-the-grid Anglo-American intelligence agency. This fictitious agency is a great literary invention, that enables Cumming a lot of creative freedom, without being constrained by the reality of how MI6 or the CIA might actually operate.
KENNEDY 35 follows the structure of the previous novels BOX 88 and Judas 62, switching between two different timelines. The first follows a young Lachlan Kite as he carries out his first fledgling missions for Box 88. Invariably something goes wrong and it’s the brash inexperienced Kite’s fault. The second storyline follows an older, seasoned Kite who gets to tidy up his mistakes and make amends for the sins of his past.
In KENNEDY 35 Cumming examines the horrors of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when the Hutu majority attacked the minority Tutsi population killing an estimated 600,000 people in 100 days. It was a genocide escalated by Hutu radio broadcasts urging neighbours to turn on neighbours. The novel picks up the story one year after the genocide, when 24-year-old Kite and his girlfriend, Martha Raine, are sent to Senegal to capture Augustin Bagaza. Bagaza made numerous radio broadcasts inciting the murder of Tutsi’s, personally instructing tens of thousands of people to commit mass murder and is described as the ‘Eichmann of the Rwandan genocide’.
After a very challenging operation, where Kite must make some stark choices, things go drastically wrong. In the second timeline it is 2023, Kite is 51 and head of BOX 88, Eric Appiah an old school friend warns him of loose ends from the operation in Senegal that threaten to endanger Kite and Martha. The ever-resourceful Kite and his team consequently become embroiled with rogue elements of the French Secret Service and a criminal network with links to international terrorism.
This is a tense and carefully plotted contemporary spy novel that is not reliant on technology to carry the plot, keeping the reader involved through the worlds of well observed and interesting characters. It doesn’t shy away from the horror of a subject matter that is little talked about these days. The ending for me was not as satisfying as the previous books, but we are left with a terrifying cliff-hanger.
Alan Bardos is the author of Rising Tide.
