The Spanish Game Charles Cummings Michael Joseph Hbk £12.99 ISBN: 071814726X Feb. 2006 Peter Guttridge

Charles Cumming is probably the best of the new generation of British spy writers who are taking over where Le Carre and Deighton left off. The spies are younger, less jaded but equally cynical and still operating in a wholly amoral world. Cummings’s character, Alec Milius, who returns in The Spanish Game, is cocky, pragmatic, edgy, paranoid and guilty. Quite a mixture, but then in the course of the previous novel, A Spy By Nature, Milius – recruited by MI6 when he was 24 – caused the undying enmity of the CIA and the death of his girlfriend then put his best friend at risk.

In The Spanish Game, Milius has gone to ground in Madrid, living under multiple identities, convinced either the CIA or MI6 are out to get him. He’d like to be honest and open but he’s addicted to secrecy. And when a prominent politician disappears he can’t resist trying to find what is going on. Cue more duplicity, betrayal and the mushroom cloud of terrorism.

Back in the Sixties heyday of spy fiction, young spies were only presented in hip pastiches such as Adam Diment’s The Bang Bang Birds (well, it was the Sixties). These days they’ve come of age.