Cumming skillfully weaves Lockie's present day dilemmas with the past, his personal history and what happened that fateful summer in the South of France. The Lockerbie bombing looms large in people’s minds, Salman Rushdie is in protective custody following Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa and events in Tehran continue to cause concerns. Lachlan Kite, recruited straight from an elite boarding school, is sent to France – the frontline of a new secret war. It grabs the reader's attention from the first page and tells a fascinating story a secret intelligence unit, Box 88 and how Lachlan Kite, an impressionable public schoolboy was recruited 30 years ago to help find the perpetrators of the Lockerbie disaster. The story takes you from the Lockerbie bombing to the South of France, the story flows effectively and really draws you in from start to finish.

Box 88 is such a clever story full of surprises the descriptions are brilliant I felt I was there with Lockie A very enjoyable read I hope to read more about Lockie and his work . I have never read an espionage book before but if they are as good as this one I will certainly read more of them. Kite quickly learns that his abduction is connected with a summer spent in France many years ago when he was first recruited to Box 88 as a young public school boy. The Cold War will soon be over, but for BOX 88, a top secret spying agency, the espionage game is heating up.the moral dilemmas of performing their covert v activities and the sheer intelligence of the author in navigating and refreshing the tropes of spy thrillers.

I enjoyed this well paced thriller and would certainly like to read more about Lachlan Kite and his organisation: a clue on the last page of the novel led me to believe there is indeed another book on the way. I enjoy the occasional thriller featuring daring deeds undertaken by agents working for MI6 or the CIA. The characters were well described and the settings evocative, particularly the villa near Mougins where they are all staying. It all starts with Lachlan Kite attending a boarding school and showing one of his teachers that he is a good candidate for a top secret spying mission. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail.I was most pleased to read of the actualité when it came to bugging devices, especially ones which need to transmit over a mile. This version of Her Majesty – shrewd, sensible and inquisitive – has much in common with Alan Bennett’s royal creation in The Uncommon Reader, and the resulting book, with its mixture of real and imagined characters, is charming, cosy and respectful. is the tale of Lachlan Kite, recruited by a teacher at a lightly fictionalised version of Eton to spy on behalf of the titular agency, a super-secret organisation embedded in the UK and US intelligence network. Lachlan Kite, recruited from an elite boarding school, is sent to France, tasked with gathering intelligence on an enigmatic Iranian businessman implicated in the Lockerbie bombing.

Taken captive and brutally tortured, Kite has a choice: reveal the truth about what happened in France thirty years earlier – or watch his family die. The investigation Kite was embroiled in was almost background to his relationships with the family he was holidaying with, just as it would be for any teen and felt very real. Nit-picking aside, I thought that Box 88 was a really good spy thriller and if you think so too, you'll be pleased to learn that the ending left the possibility of further books featuring Lachlan Kite.A well-written and gripping thriller, with great characters, and I hope to read more about Lachlan Kite. The story and its conclusion nicely sets up a potential next book and has put the author on my must read list.

Jolly good spy thriller - espionage in a rather old fashioned way but all the better for the book is a good enjoyable read. There are some excellent characters especially Lockie whose teenage naivety contrasts so well with the experienced operator in his forties, he’s a skilful agents utilising all his mental agility and physical strength. The timeline then shifts between the Summer when he was 18 and recruited to spy on his hosts in a villa in the South of France following the Lockerbie bombing – and present day. He was recruited out of a typical English boarding school and as a teenager ended up spying on a controversial figure at the family summer home of his best friend in the south of France.As someone who grew up unhappy (and not belonging) at a British boarding school, there were a lot of amusing, sometimes uncomfortably reminiscent, flashback details and moments when I felt sympathy for Kite — Cumming critiques the elite school system brilliantly, highlighting its inequities and bizarre Darwinian elements. The ease with which Box 88 tested the young Lochlan Kite prior to him being approached to become a spy was rather fanciful and almost impossible to pull off in real life, witnessed by the lack of explanation of the ticket inspector. The stories tend to be complex puzzles you have to be on your game to unravel and usually told in a manner that ensures you have to pay very close attention to the detail.