The Predicament

Mistake-prone amateur spy Gabriel Dax romps through two minor international crises of the early 1960s in Boyd’s shrewd latest espionage tale (after Gabriel’s Moon). A professional travel writer with no training in spycraft, Dax works for MI6 unofficially, under the auspices of his sometime-girlfriend, agent Faith Green. Though he’d prefer to withdraw to his cottage in East Sussex and continue working on his new book about the great rivers of the world, Dax is sent to Guatemala in March 1963 to check on the political rise of a labor leader trying to unseat the country’s CIA-backed military government. Things quickly get hairy: Dax is threatened, then stabbed, by thugs who oppose his sniffing around. He recovers in England before Faith sends him to Berlin to check out reports that assassins may be targeting President John F. Kennedy during a weeklong visit. Dax bumbles his way through that mission, helping thwart disaster via a string of accidentally heroic acts inspired by his instincts as a writer. Readers will be charmed by Dax’s tendency to fail upward, and Boyd smoothly incorporates real history into his wildly entertaining plot. This is a treat. Agent: Grainne Fox, UTA. (Nov.)