Adam LeBor

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Interpreters, like waiters, are often little noticed. But they too have eyes and ears, and proximity to power means they can pick up all sorts of intelligence. In Harriet Crawley’s The Translator (Bitter Lemon Press, £16.99) Marina Volina is the translator for Russia’s president Serov. He is planning to cut Britain’s underwater internet cables and trusts Marina absolutely — which is a mistake, for she wants out. When her former lover, Clive Franklin, arrives in Moscow to translate for the visit…

Murdering 800,000 people by hand with machetes is slow work. The Rwandan genocide took place from April to July 1994, while the world watched and did nothing; Kofi Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping, even went on to become UN secretary-general. The legacy of the slaughter runs like a bloody thread through Charles Cumming’s Kennedy 35 (HarperCollins £18.99/Mysterious Press $27.95), out in October. The third in the series featuring Lachlan Kite, an operative for Box 88, a secret intelligence age…

The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes (Bantam/Atria) Ten years in the making, the much-anticipated follow-up to the global bestseller I Am Pilgrim has all the cinematic sweep and verve of Hayes’s debut. The storyline is just as enthralling. Kane, a CIA spy, must extract a top-secret source with knowledge of a planned terrorist spectacular from the badlands between Pakistan and Iran — but it all goes wrong. The characters are richer and even more compelling, especially the terrifying antagonist,…

Every author hopes their first novel will be garlanded with praise and become a global bestseller. It does happen: Terry Hayes’s 2013 debut, I Am Pilgrim, was a panoramic epic that was translated into 30 languages. The tricky part, naturally, is the next book. It’s taken a decade for his follow-up, The Year of the Locust (Bantam £22/Atria $32 to be published in February), to hit the shelves — so was the wait worth it? In short: absolutely. Hayes is an accomplished screenwriter as well as a nove…

For thriller writers, Mother Russia, like the CIA, just keeps on giving. The original cold war may be over but new fronts have opened, not least in international finance. In David McCloskey’s Moscow X (Swift Press £13.99/WW Norton $29.99) the CIA aims to disrupt Putin’s money networks — or as Artemis Aphrodite Procter, former station chief in Tajikistan, says, cause “fuckery and general mayhem”. Procter deploys Sia Fox and Max Castillo to recruit Anna Agapova, a glamorous international banker a…

Vivian Parry is an acerbic New York theatre critic, which brings her a kind of fame — and enemies. But, like many people with apparently glamorous jobs, she is miserable. Brought up without knowing her father, she has also never recovered from the death of her mother. Self-medicating with a steady flow of vodka and pills, she barely ingests any calories. Not surprisingly, she keeps fainting. Yet Vivian is self-aware enough to know that her job is an elaborate compensation mechanism. Even as she…

A modern makeover for Fleming’s spy and a reissue of a classic actioner — but little relief after the gulag

Moscow X by David McCloskey (Swift Press/WW Norton) McCloskey’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut Damascus Station confirms his place in the first division of spy writers. The story roams from Moscow to Mexico and Washington, DC, as the CIA plans to bring down Putin’s money men. Steamy sex scenes, skilfully executed, add an extra layer to an enthralling read. Beirut Station by Paul Vidich (No Exit Press/Pegasus) Vidich writes with a serpentine elegance about the moral dilemmas of espionage in…

Capers in Constantinople and Cornwall — plus a chilling story of espionage set in 1930s Vienna — are among the most compelling new spy novels