While I wait with bated breath for the new John Le Carre to emerge from the the hallowed halls of Hodder & Stoughton, I picked up The Spanish Game by Charles Cumming, an author who has been hyped as a worthy successor to Le Carre (not that he needs one at the moment!). This is Cummings’ third book, the first of his I have read and the second to feature the British spy Alec Milius.

Six years after the events of Cummings’ debut, Milius is living in Madrid; no longer in the employ of MI6, he is unwilling or unable to let go of his life in secret intelligence. Milius is convinced that his former employers would still like to locate him, not to mention the CIA, following the collapse of an operation that was run against the Americans. He has numerous bank accounts and mobile phones, false passports, a substantial cash reserve; he indulges in regular counter-surveillance and generally what he thinks of as a healthy doses of suspicion towards anything and anyone. His deep-seated suspicions are even turned on his oldest friend, Saul, when he comes out to visit, and it’s clear that he will consider the possibility that anyone in his life could betray him – except, perhaps, his boss’s wife, with whom he is having an affair. In short, Alec Milius still things of himself as a spy.

As part of his job working for a British finance company, Milius is asked to do some work on the suitability of the Basque country for inward investment – which brings him in to contact with a former member of ETA’s political wing. He strikes up a friendship, but when the man fails to show for a second meeting in Madrid, Milius gets worried, and starts digging around. Gradually he becomes embroiled in a complex, twisting plot involving investigative reporters, the official world of secret intelligence, gun-runners, murder, kidnapping, and a murky conspiracy to carry out extra-judicial killing against ETA. Very little is as it seems, and every time Milius thinks he knows what’s going on, he gets a rude awakening. As the book ends with a final big twist, it would definitely appear to be the case that Milius will be back.

Set against the background of the build-up to the Iraq War, The Spanish Game is an enjoyable and efficient thriller. Cummings has researched both the background to his plot and the mechanics of the spy game thoroughly, and in Milius he has created a very interesting narrator, someone who needs the secret world as much as it needs him. Despite an occasional tendency towards showing off, or going in to a bit too much detail about procedure, Cummings is an effective writer and, on this evidence, has a long career ahead of him reflecting the changes to the world of secret intelligence wrought by modern technology and the shifting political landscape brought about by the War on Terror.

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