The Trinity Six

This the third book reviewed by Charles Cumming in the blog. The Trinity Six is a classic and updated WWII spy novel. Given that it’s a current day novel with many of the characters of interest having already died, the covert techniques described by Cummings covered both old time field craft and modern spy techniques.

There really was a “Cambridge Five,” the title for five men who were undergraduates at Cambridge in the 1930s who became an effective group of spies for Russia during WWII. (Trinity College is one of the colleges at Cambridge.) This book takes off from that reality with the notion that there was a sixth spy who had never been revealed even though many scholars had looked for evidence of such and suspected many men of being the sixth man. In this book, the protagonist is Dr. Sam Gaddis, a Russian History professor at Trinity College. The current Russian president is Sergie Platov, a very Putlin-like tsar-like figure, and Gaddis had just finished an academic tome called Tsars which was nothing less than a blistering attack on the Platov regime. Platov was a most important figure in trying to cover up any such research – but why would he do that? Shouldn’t the success of a Russian spy network look good for the Kremlin?

Because of his book, Gaddis was approached by a young woman, Holly Levette, who said she had been given some secret papers from her mother, Katya Levette. Katya had been working on a book about the alleged sixth Trinity Spy when she suffered a premature death, probably from alcoholism. Holly thought Gaddis might be interested in her mother’s research, and then as he began to delve into the material and talk with others about it, people started to die. Most notably murdered was his ex-girlfriend, a colleague who he consulted about the project. Then there were others.

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I need not lead you through the plot which was clever. There were significant twists and turns, but it was not too complex to follow (as I’ve found with some other intricate spy novels). Cummings did a good job with the supporting characters. More than with many authors, I could really picture his many locations that Cummings artfully portrayed. I thoroughly enjoyed this story and am very impressed with Cummings story telling skills. I’ll be reading more of his books.