Cold Sunset by William Boyd

This is the third of William Boyd’s novels featuring travel writer turned spy Gabriel Dax. If you haven’t read the first two, Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament, I highly recommend you do so as it will make this book much easier to follow – and they are both excellent books in their own right, so you won’t regret it. Cold Sunset opens in 1964 with Gabriel in California where he has been instructed by MI6 to make contact with poet Francis Falkner who says he suspects his former Bletchley Park colleague, Angus Fairford, of passing information to the Russians during the war. As always, Gabriel feels uncomfortable with this kind of task and would prefer to spend his time in America researching his new book, but by now he’s so deeply entangled with his double life and the requests of his M16 handler Faith Green that he doesn’t know how to get out of it. After returning to England (and dealing with the reappearance of a villain from the previous book who comes looking for revenge), Gabriel…