Cold Sunset is the third Gabriel Dax spy thriller by William Boyd. I was hooked from the first, Gabriel’s Moon, and so turned to page one of Cold Sunset with high anticipation. It is the Sixties, the Cold War and Gabriel, a travel writer cum reluctant spy, is in Los Angeles waiting to meet a poet. 
The meat of Gabriel’s assignment in Cold Sunset is to go to Moscow to bring in MI6’s man in Russia, triple agent Kit Caldwell who is desperate to return to London. Gabriel’s visit to LA, and another to Indianapolis, may seem superfluous but read them carefully, there are hints at the deeper story. His Institute of Development Studies handler and occasional lover from the previous two books, Faith Green, is still giving him orders. Faith’s job is to root out traitors and when the dying poet tells Gabriel that a former colleague from Bletchley Park is a Soviet spy, Faith sends Gabriel to Indianapolis to check it out. It is a road that leads to Moscow, St Petersburg and the northernmost Finnish-Soviet border. The betrayal, Faith fears, could be a threat as serious as the Cambridge Five and she is under pressure to identify the new traitor, the ‘terminte.’
Gabriel is a patriot, a freelance writer trying to make a living, a single man with romantic entanglements, he leads a double-life and is unable to say no to Faith whenever she gives him a mission. The difference is that now he is not a novice at killing men. He knows enough tradecraft to lay false clues, spot a tail and speak in spook language. Yes Boyd’s Gabriel Dax books are spy thrillers but the action is not full-on, they are also studies in human nature, in relationships, in the detail of daily life in the Sixties. The finding of a cleaner for his Sussex cottage, leaving out food to tempt Cat his occasionally visiting feline neighbour to be a permanent resident, forgetting to change the sheets on his bed at his London crashpad, his inability to say no to a night with an old girlfriend. Gabriel feels real. People smoked and drunk alcohol more than they do now, it was possible to appear and disappear without leaving a trace, postcards written with short messages were delivered quickly by post.
Reading a William Boyd thriller is like reading no other. A combination of dry wit and literary references, stomach-clenching tension and the ordinary everyday of buying fish and wine for lunch, nervous suspicion and outright fear, Cold Sunset is so Boydian. I had a fondness for his Sussex neighbour Royston Mitchell-Moore in his cherry red corduroy trousers, and old roué Norman Helenhill who reminded me of Olivia Manning’s Prince Yakimov in Fortunes of War.
I do hope there will be another Gabriel Dax book, the enigmatic ending suggests there will be. If you think you don’t like thrillers, try Boyd.
Here are my reviews of other Gabriel Dax books:-
GABRIEL’S MOON #1GABRIELDAX
THE PREDICAMENT #2GABRIELDAX
… and my reviews of other books by William Boyd:-
ANY HUMAN HEART
LOVE IS BLIND
NAT TATE: AN AMERICAN ARTIST 1928-1960
ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS
SWEET CARESS
THE BLUE AFTERNOON
THE DREAMS OF BETHANY MELLMOTH
TRIO
WAITING FOR SUNRISE
… and try the first paragraph of ARMADILLO.
If you like this, try these:-
‘Exposure’ by Helen Dunmore
‘Midnight in Europe’ by Alan Furst
‘The Partisan’ by Patrick Worrall
And if you’d like to share a link:
#BookReview COLD SUNSET by William Boyd https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-adF via @SandraDanby
COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- 
SANDRA DANBY'S BOOK REVIEWS 