Charles Cumming Books in Order (Alex Milius, Thomas Kell, Box 88)

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Charles Cumming is a Scottish writer of spy fiction for more than two decades now. He started his writing career in 2001 with the publication of his first book, A Spy by Nature.

This first novel introduced the character of Alec Milius who was later featured in another book. In fact, Cumming wrote multiple series–The Alex Milius series, the Thomas Kell series, and the Box 88 series–but also standalone novels.

How to read Charles Cumming’s Books in Order?

Reading The Alec Milius Series in Order

  1. A Spy by Nature (2001) – Alec Milius is young, smart and ambitious – with a talent for deception. When a chance encounter opens the door to a career with MI6, he is desperate to make his mark. But life as a spy begins to take a terrible toll on himself and those around him, and soon Alec is chasing not just success but survival. Forced to work alone, he spins a web of deceit that traps him centre stage in a game of global espionage.
  2. The Spanish Game (2006) – For six years, Alec Milius has escaped the past. In Madrid, he has rebuilt his life, but remains in exile and in danger. Slightly older, and much wiser, than the young spy who first impressed MI6, he has kept his fatal attraction to secrets. So when a prominent politician mysteriously disappears, Alec is lured back into the spying game. Only this time he operates without the protection of any official agency – isolated and expendable, with nobody to turn to if things go wrong. And they soon do.

Reading The Thomas Kell Series in Order

  1. A Foreign Country (2012) – Six weeks before she is due to become the first female head of MI6, Amelia Levene disappears without a trace. Disgraced ex-agent Thomas Kell is brought in from the cold with orders to find her – quickly and quietly. The mission offers Kell a way back into the secret world, the only life he’s ever known. Tracking her through France and North Africa, Kell embarks on a dangerous voyage, shadowed by foreign intelligence services. This far from home soil, the rules of the game are entirely different – and the consequences worse than anyone imagines…
  2. A Colder War (2014) – When MI6’s top spy in Turkey is killed in a mysterious plane crash, his chance arrives… for Thomas Kell is the only man Service Chief Amelia Levene can trust to investigate the accident. In Istanbul, Kell soon discovers that there is a traitor inside Western Intelligence. Then he meets Rachel- the dead spy’s daughter- and the stakes grow higher still. From London to Greece and into Eastern Europe, Kell tracks the mole. But a betrayal close to home transforms the operation into something more personal. Soon Kell will stop at nothing to see it through.
  3. A Divided Spy (2016) – Thomas Kell is offered an unexpected chance at revenge. Taking the law into his own hands, he embarks on a mission to recruit a top Russian spy who is in possession of a terrifying secret. As Kell tracks his man from Moscow to London, he finds himself in a high stakes game of cat and mouse in which it becomes increasingly difficult to know who is playing whom.

Reading The Box 88 Series in Order

  1. Box 88 (2020) – 1989: The Cold War will soon be over, but for BOX 88, a top-secret spying agency, the espionage game is heating up. Lachlan Kite is sent to France to gather intelligence on the Lockerbie bombing. What he uncovers is terrifying… 2020: Kite has been taken captive and brutally tortured. He now has a choice: reveal the truth about what happened in France thirty years earlier – or watch his family die.
  2. Judas 62 (2021) – 1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia in the guise of a language teacher. In reality, he is there to extract a chemical weapons scientist before his groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong. 2020: Now the director of BOX 88 operations in the UK, Kite discovers he has been placed on the ‘JUDAS’ list – a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination.
  3. Kennedy 35 (2023) – 1995: In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, 24-year-old spy Lachlan Kite and his girlfriend, Martha Raine, are sent to Senegal on the trail of a hunted war criminal. The present-day: Eric Appiah, an old friend from Senegal days, makes contact with Kite claiming to have explosive information about the activities of the Chinese government in Africa. When tragedy strikes, Kite finds himself in the crosshairs of a ruthless international plot that threatens to unravel everything he holds dear.

Reading Other Novels by Charles Cumming

  • The Hidden Man (2003) – Mark and Benjamin Keen have not seen their father, Christopher, for more than twenty years. Hoping for a reconciliation, Christopher reappears, but he has only just begun to shed light on his life in the secret service when he is murdered in cold blood by an unidentified assassin. Was his death connected to his MI6 past? Did Christopher uncover a dangerous conspiracy involving his elder son? And what were his links to Moscow, Afghanistan and the Russian mafia in London?
  • Typhoon (2008) – In 1997, a few months before the British government is scheduled to return Hong Kong to Chinese rule, Joe Lennox, a brilliant young operative for SIS (MI6), loses both his girlfriend and his first high-profile asset – a prominent defector who disappears from a safe house. The girlfriend, the ravishing Isabella Aubert, he lost to Miles Coolidge, a hard-bitten CIA agent; the asset to collusion between his bosses and the CIA. A decade later, Lennox is back in China, facing his old nemeses. With the CIA plotting to use an Islamic group to destabilize China, the SIS seeking to thwart them and his old asset the key to all of this, Lennox, Coolidge, and the girlfriend they shared are hopelessly intertwined in a plot where trust is impossible and truth is unknowable.
  • The Trinity Six (2011) – London, 1992. Late one night, Edward Crane, 76, is declared dead at a London hospital. An obituary describes him only as a ‘resourceful career diplomat’. But Crane was much more than that – and the circumstances surrounding his death are far from what they seem. Fifteen years later, academic Sam Gaddis needs money. When a journalist friend asks for his help researching a possible sixth member of the notorious Trinity spy ring, Gaddis knows that she’s onto a story that could turn his fortunes around. But within hours the journalist is dead, apparently from a heart attack…
  • The Moroccan Girl (aka The Man Between in the UK, 2018) – Renowned author Kit Carradine is approached by an MI6 officer with a seemingly straightforward assignment: to track down a mysterious woman hiding somewhere in the exotic, perilous city of Marrakesh. But when Carradine learns the woman is a dangerous fugitive with ties to international terrorism, the glamour of being a spy is soon tainted by fear and betrayal.

Don’t forget to bookmark this article to be sure to not miss anything new from Charles Cumming. And, if you like his work, you may also be interested in Mick Herron‘s books.

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