Category: Reading Challenges

Book Review – The Predicament by William Boyd

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About the Book

Front cover of The Predicament by William Boyd

Gabriel Dax, travel writer and accidental spy, is back in the shadows. Unable to resist the allure of his MI6 handler, Faith Green, he has returned to a life of secrets and subterfuge. Dax is sent to Guatemala under the guise of covering a tinderbox presidential election, where the ruthless decisions of the Mafia provoke pitch-black warfare in collusion with the CIA.

As political turmoil erupts, Gabriel’s reluctant involvement deepens. His escape plan leads him to West Berlin, where he uncovers a chilling realisation: there is a plot to assassinate magnetic young President John F. Kennedy. In a race against time, Gabriel must navigate deceit and danger, knowing that the stakes have never been higher . . .

Format: Hardcover (272 pages) Publisher: Viking
Publication date: 4th September 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction, Thriller

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My Review

Gabriel Dax is certainly in a predicament. He’s in thrall to Faith Green, the head of the MI6 section known as ‘the termite hunters’ charged with rooting out traitors within the service. He finds her alluring but something of an enigma. Indeed he refers to her as ‘the Sphinx of the Institute of Developmental Studies’, the cover name for her section.

Does she feel the same way about him? Sometimes he thinks the answer is yes, at other times he wonders if he’s just being manipulated because his travel writing provides useful cover for trips abroad and opens doors that might otherwise be closed. Such is the case when he’s sent to Guatamala to interview an influential presidential candidate. His last interview with a similar figure didn’t end well, and this time is no different.

So enmeshed in the secret world of espionage has Gabriel become that he’s found himself in the dubious position of posing as a double agent for the Russians, acting as decoy for a British triple agent. The only upside is the Russians are generous with money enabling him to move to the countryside in the hope of finding some peace and quiet to work on his latest book. Some hope…

Gabriel is someone you can’t help rooting for even though he often makes foolish blunders and lets his fascination with Faith lead him into all sorts of dangerous situations. Having said that, Faith is facing her own challenges just at the moment. To quote Shakespeare, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions’ because a problem Gabriel encountered on his previous mission, which he thought he’d put to bed permanently, resurfaces (literally), he’s being sued for plagiarism and his ex-girlfriend Lorraine is keen to rekindle their relationship. His only respite from his problems is his sessions with his therapist, Dr Katrina Haas.

The book has all the hallmarks of an espionage thriller with Gabriel forced to adopt the sort of spycraft you’d find in a John lé Carre novel, including how to lose someone trying to follow you. He’s also given a quick lesson in how to kill using only the contents of your pockets, such as a notebook or set of keys. The prospect of finding himself in a dangerous situation involving some very nasty people is never far away.

From Guatemala the action moves to West Berlin (don’t worry, there are connections) and sees Gabriel become involved in frantic attempts to disrupt a plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. You might be thinking, we all know JFK wasn’t assassinated in Berlin so where’s the tension? But of course Gabriel doesn’t know that. His frenzied efforts to spot a face in the crowd, a face only he has seen, and then the sudden realisation that everyone is on the wrong track is absolutely gripping even if it does have strong ‘The Day of the Jackal’ vibes.

The Predicament is a thoroughly enjoyable, stylish spy thriller with a great sense of time and place.

I received a review copy courtesy of Viking via NetGalley.

In three words: Intriguing, entertaining, well-crafted
Try something similar: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

About the Author

Author William Boyd

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. Any Human Heart was longlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a TV series with Channel 4. In 2005, Boyd was awarded the CBE. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France. (Photo: Goodreads author page/Bio: Publisher author page)

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Book Review – A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang

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About the Book

The year is 1924. The cobblestoned streets of St. James ring with jazz as Britain races forward into an age of peace and prosperity. London’s back alleys, however, are filled with broken soldiers and still enshadowed by the lingering horrors of the Great War.

Only a few years removed from the trenches of Flanders himself, Lieutenant Eric Peterkin has just been granted membership in the most prestigious soldiers-only club in London: The Britannia. But when a gentleman’s wager ends with a member stabbed to death, the victim’s last words echo in the Lieutenant’s head: that he would “soon right a great wrong from the past.”

Eric is certain that one of his fellow members is the murderer: but who? Captain Mortimer Wolfe, the soldier’s soldier thrice escaped from German custody? Second Lieutenant Oliver Saxon, the brilliant codebreaker? Or Captain Edward Aldershott, the steely club president whose Savile Row suits hide a frightening collision of mustard gas scars?

Eric’s investigation will draw him far from the marbled halls of the Britannia, to the shadowy remains of a dilapidated war hospital and the heroin dens of Limehouse. And as the facade of gentlemenhood cracks, Eric faces a Matryoshka doll of murder, vice, and secrets pointing not only to the officers of his own club but the very investigator assigned by Scotland Yard.

Format: ebook (344 pages) Publisher: Inkshares
Publication date: 31st July 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

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My Review

A Gentleman’s Murder is the first book in the author’s historical crime series featuring amateur sleuth, Eric Peterkin. In fact, as the book starts Eric doesn’t know he’s going to be adopting the role of sleuth. It’s only once a murder occurs at the Britannia Club where he’s a member (as have generations of Peterkins been before him) that he feels obliged to conduct his own investigation. In addition, something he glimpses shortly after the murder is discovered makes him doubt how thoroughly the police will conduct the investigation.

Making Eric the son of a Chinese mother and English father not only makes him distinctive as a character but allows the author to address the racism of the time fuelled by sterotypical images of Chinese people contained in ‘Yellow Peril’ novels and plays which portrayed the Chinaman as a master-criminal involved in prostitution, gambling and opium smoking. (You can read more about this, as well other themes in the book, in Christopher Huang’s fascinating Author’s Note.)

The murder is not so much a ‘locked room’ mystery as a ‘locked vault’ mystery. As well as the means by which the murder was carried out, there are missing items which Eric suspects are vital to discovering the motivation for the murder and the identity of the murderer. It means a journey back into the past and the lives of those injured both physically and psychologically in the Great War, many of whom still bear the scars.

I really enjoyed this aspect of the book which brings home the lasting impact of the war, even on those who survived it. Eric himself is haunted by memories of what he witnessed in the trenches and increasingly feels a sense of guilt that he has not taken the trouble to find out how the soldiers under his command have fared since the war ended.

The author has constructed a cunningly plotted crime mystery with a range of possible suspects each of whom might have had a motive to carry out the murder. Very observant readers may spot a small detail at the beginning of the book which points to the culprit. I suspect most, like me, will only recognise this in retrospect after the solution has been revealed.

My one reservation was that I didn’t feel I got to know Eric very well as a person, not just as a sleuth. There were things I wanted to know, such as how he and his friend Avery met. It felt almost as if this was the second book in a series and those things had been spelled out in the earlier book. I’m hoping I get to know Eric a little better when he returns in A Pretender’s Murder.

A Gentleman’s Murder is a clever historical mystery with a great sense of period. Definitely recommended for fans of ‘Golden Age’ crime novels .

I received a digital review copy courtesy of Inkshares.

In three words: Intriguing, intricate, atmospheric
Try something similar: The House at Devil’s Neck by Tom Mead

About the Author

Christopher Huang was born in Singapore, where he lived out the first seventeen years of his life. He moved to Canada in the expectation of cooler weather, returning to Singapore the following year to serve his two years of National Service in the Singapore Army. He studied architecture at McGill University, and lived the next twenty-odd years in Montreal. He now lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he has yet to find a proper jar of real, actual Bovril. A longtime fan of the principles of fair play governing the mystery genre, he thinks of detective stories as an early form of interactive fiction. He is, of course, very fond of modern interactive fiction as well. (Bio/photo: Author website)

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