Typhoon

In 1997, a few months before the British government is scheduled to return Hong Kong to Chinese rule, Joe Lennox, a brilliant young Secret Service agent for M16, suffers a major reversal. A high-profile asset—an elderly academic claiming to know a sinister secret about the Chinese government—disappears from a safe house in the middle of the night, the result of collusion between Lennox's bosses in M16 and Miles Coolidge, a maverick CIA officer. At the same time, Joe's relationship with his girlfriend, the ravishing Isabella Aubert, begins to unravel.

 

More than ten years later, as the country is gearing up for the Beijing Olympics, Joe Lennox finds himself back in China, facing his old nemeses. The CIA has set in motion a plot to use an Islamist group to destabilize China. M16 is opposed to the plan and will stop at nothing to derail it. At the center of the conspiracy are two men: the asset whom Lennox lost control of more than a decade earlier, and Miles Coolidge, who is now working under deep cover in Shanghai. Caught in the middle is Isabella, the woman Joe has never stopped loving. Their lives once again intertwined, they are caught up in a plot where trust is impossible, the truth is unknowable—and failure is unthinkable.

Praise

"Typhoon is easy to like. The plot is tight and complex, and the local details are accurate about the three main cities where it is set: Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing."—James Fallows, The New York Times Book Review

 

"In the tradition of old-school espionage fiction, Cumming lets character rather than plot carry this compelling thriller. William Lasker, a second-string agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service, takes on the job of writing a book about a rogue CIA plot against the People's Republic of China. The action, which takes place mainly in Hong Kong and Shanghai, focuses on Joe Lennox, an SIS undercover agent in China, and an older CIA veteran, Miles Coolidge. Several months before the turnover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, a defector, Professor Wang Kaixuan, climbs out of the South China Sea and announces he has important secret information. After the professor disappears, Joe slowly learns the defector has become part of Typhoon, a secret CIA plan being run by Miles whose aim is to destabilize China. The conflict between Joe and Miles, both personal and professional, fuels this complex and satisfying novel."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author(s)

Charles Cumming

Charles Cumming is the author of the international bestselling thrillers A Spy By Nature and The Spanish Game. He is a contributing editor of The Week magazine and currently lives in London.

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