Breakaway Books

Authored by William Boyd; Published September 2024; Thriller

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

Have you ever dreamed of becoming a spy? Read Gabriel’s Moon and have cold water splashed all over your fantasies—spycraft does not come naturally to ordinary guys.

Gabriel’s Moon follows Gabriel, a travel writer,  as he is sent on a series of errands for the British spy service MI-6. Although he resists at first, Gabriel gives in and is sent to Spain and Poland as an innocuous courier of sorts. Mysteriously, a chance encounter from a previous journalistic expedition in the Congo keeps cropping up and putting Gabriel in danger. As he works to understand the machinations at work around him, Gabriel has to wise up quickly to avoid getting killed.

My single biggest problem with the novel is how often I thought to myself, “how naive” when Gabriel assumed the spies around him were telling the truth. At times, he seemed personally offended by the lies that MI-6 told him, which struck me as, at best, trustful, and at worst, idiotic. Combine this trait with his continual wandering from his long-term girlfriend, and it made Gabriel very difficult for me to like. He bumbled his way through the novel, continually manipulated by those around him, and I was frankly amazed that (spoiler alert) the last page didn’t end with his death. Imagine: James Bond, but incompetent and very not sexy.

All that being said, the setting was intriguing—post-world war II Europe, grappling with the threat of Communism, the Iron Curtain just raised. I particularly enjoyed observing the reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis from the European perspective. In terms of insight into the espionage of the period, it was an enlightening look into the continual spy wars between Russian and Western Europe. Of course, Gabriel’s perspective provided a mere peek into the ongoing battle, but it was enough to whet the appetite for sure.

This might not be exactly the espionage thriller you’re looking for, but Gabriel’s Moon does feel realistic enough for ordinary people to live through.