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A review by brettt
The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming
2.0
For the United States, the Robert Hanssen case from 2001 is certainly one of its worst intelligence disasters, if not the actual top. Hanssen sold U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and then to Russia from 1979 to 2001. For Great Britian, the top (or bottom) spot is taken by the so-called Cambridge or Trinity Five, a group of four known and one suspected agents who sold British secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II and into the 1950s before defecting to the U.S.S.R. The ring, some of whom held high positions in the government as well as British intelligence, were all students at Trinity College in Cambridge University and thought to have been recruited then.
In The Trinity Six, Charles Cumming supposes a sixth member of the ring, previously kept hidden by the MI6 foreign intelligence service, whose identity is about to be exposed by a journalist. That journalist dies, and her friend, college professor and Russia expert Samuel Gaddis, takes her research and tries to follow her leads to expose the long-forgotten spy. But intelligence services like to keep their secrets secret, and they have fewer qualms than many about how they do so. And there may be some others involved, with even fewer scruples. Gaddis has begun a game with stakes far beyond faculty politics, and one he is not ready to play.
The actual Trinity/Cambridge spy ring serves mostly as a MacGuffin for Cumming, as it is the secrets behind the secret that will both drive Gaddis' search and his enemies' moves to stop him. So a significant part of the story seems wasted; much of it could have been trimmed to move into the meat of the narrative a lot more quickly or to give it more of a purpose for being there. Gaddis himself isn't someone you'd root for if you had many choices; he begins a relationship during the early part of the story and not long after contemplates how he will make a move on a researcher he's met during a records search. He's also not too bright; doing things to put himself in danger as well as those close to him and failing to grasp how far ahead of a college professor actual professional spies might be in a spy-related matter.
The combination drains The Trinity Six of much of the interest it could have had; Cummings' wry tone and ability to keep from telegraphing a plot twist make it palatable but nothing that would add him to any list of must-reads.
Original available here.
In The Trinity Six, Charles Cumming supposes a sixth member of the ring, previously kept hidden by the MI6 foreign intelligence service, whose identity is about to be exposed by a journalist. That journalist dies, and her friend, college professor and Russia expert Samuel Gaddis, takes her research and tries to follow her leads to expose the long-forgotten spy. But intelligence services like to keep their secrets secret, and they have fewer qualms than many about how they do so. And there may be some others involved, with even fewer scruples. Gaddis has begun a game with stakes far beyond faculty politics, and one he is not ready to play.
The actual Trinity/Cambridge spy ring serves mostly as a MacGuffin for Cumming, as it is the secrets behind the secret that will both drive Gaddis' search and his enemies' moves to stop him. So a significant part of the story seems wasted; much of it could have been trimmed to move into the meat of the narrative a lot more quickly or to give it more of a purpose for being there. Gaddis himself isn't someone you'd root for if you had many choices; he begins a relationship during the early part of the story and not long after contemplates how he will make a move on a researcher he's met during a records search. He's also not too bright; doing things to put himself in danger as well as those close to him and failing to grasp how far ahead of a college professor actual professional spies might be in a spy-related matter.
The combination drains The Trinity Six of much of the interest it could have had; Cummings' wry tone and ability to keep from telegraphing a plot twist make it palatable but nothing that would add him to any list of must-reads.
Original available here.