BOX 88 is a black-ops outfit run jointly by the British and the Americans, so far off the books that neither MI6 nor the CIA is sure it exists. Cumming runs two clocks. In 1989, Lachlan Kite is eighteen, a Scottish scholarship kid at an English boarding school, invited by his rich best friend to spend the summer at the family villa in the South of France. The friend’s Iranian godfather will be there, an oil man tied to the Lockerbie bombing, and that is how a teenager gets recruited and handed his first job. In 2020, Kite is a seasoned officer chained up in a room, worked over by Iranian intelligence who want to know what happened that summer, with his pregnant wife kidnapped as leverage. The boarding-school half is a real coming-of-age novel about class and belonging. The other half is a straight thriller. First of a series, and Cumming has written three more.