This month marks the beginning of my 20th year as a book reviewer, and I’ve generally avoided covering spy novels during that time. That’s not because of any particular antipathy to the genre, but my literary tastes, especially when it comes to fiction, run in other directions. Regrettably, time is finite, and choices inevitably must be made.

Because I knew of William Boyd’s versatility and sterling reputation as a novelist, short story writer, critic and playwright, I decided to review his World War II thriller, RESTLESS, in 2006 and came back six years later to read WAITING FOR SUNRISE, which is set on the eve of World War I. In my review of the latter, I wrote that it “succeeds on every level…and leaves us looking forward to more of his savvy, satisfying fiction.”

With the arrival of GABRIEL’S MOON, my wait for another enjoyable Boyd thriller is over. Set in perhaps the hottest period of the Cold War --- the years surrounding the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis --- it shares with its predecessors a lean, fast-paced plot, intelligent dialogue, highly plausible characters, and a sophistication about the multiple layers of deception that those operating in the world of spying practice every day. All of this combines to make it a delightful escape from the mundane.

"GABRIEL’S MOON makes a successful grab for the reader’s attention on the first page and maintains that momentum all the way through to its satisfyingly ambiguous finish."

When Gabriel Dax, a British travel writer in his early 30s with three successful books already to his credit, receives an invitation in August 1960 to conduct a secret interview with Patrice Lumumba --- the prime minister of the People’s Republic of the Congo, which recently was liberated from Belgian colonial rule --- he has no inkling that their encounter will propel him into the world of high-stakes espionage. But after Lumumba is captured and executed following a military coup, Gabriel’s tapes of their conversation become objects of intense interest to multiple intelligence agencies, including both the United States and the Soviet Union. Without knowing why they’re such a hot item, Gabriel decides to concoct his own ruses to conceal their whereabouts, regarding them as his “life insurance.”

But Gabriel’s real, if definitely reluctant, entry into spycraft comes in the person of Faith Green, who becomes his handler. She’s about a decade older, but almost from the beginning he feels a strong sexual attraction in her “mesmerizing, destabilizing, oddly infuriating company.” Faith is employed by Britain’s MI6 and operates under the cover of an organization called the Institute of Developmental Studies.

Luring Gabriel with impressive payments and the opportunity for free travel as he contemplates the research for his next travel book, Faith dispatches him on missions to Spain and Poland where his only, seemingly innocuous job is to purchase a drawing from an artist and deliver the work to a third party. (The fact that Gabriel’s uncle is an art dealer aids his cover in this work.) Almost from the beginning, he starts “feeling slight sensations of panic, of being drawn into complexities and complicities he would never understand.”

To reveal any more of the plot --- including its several clever reversals, murders, disappearances and a suicide, as Gabriel carries out these missions and undergoes a crash course in the ways of the world of spying --- would be an act of reviewer malpractice. But even as these events unfold, he thoughtfully grapples with the moral compromises he’s forced to make in this unfamiliar, terrifying environment, elevating his predicament above the formulaic and dramatically raising the stakes in this story: “He saw how a life of duplicity could so swiftly corrupt you,” Boyd writes. “Nothing was straightforward; there were always other motives, people couldn’t be trusted, nobody was what they seemed.” And there are occasional flashes of black humor, as Gabriel wonders if “there had ever been a more reluctant spy, courier, bagman, useful idiot” than himself.

Boyd lightly seasons this relatively brief novel with a subplot that involves a fire some 25 years earlier at Gabriel’s childhood home in Oxfordshire that killed his mother (his father had died in a plane crash several years previously), but the six-year-old boy miraculously escaped it. Ever since that tragedy, Gabriel has been tortured by insomnia, and woven through the spy plot is the story of his effort to recall what happened that night. He eventually turns to a Freudian psychoanalyst who helps lead him along the path to that knowledge.

Over the course of the story, Boyd transports the reader from London to the Congo, Spain (Madrid and Cádiz), the southeast coast of England, Warsaw and Rome. In each instance, he creates a vivid sense of place that adds richness and depth. There’s much stimulating conversation in restaurants and bars, not to mention the copious alcohol and tobacco consumption that feels of a piece with the early 1960s era of James Bond in which the story takes place. Indeed, Boyd’s descriptive writing makes it easy to picture the cinematic possibilities of this story.

GABRIEL’S MOON makes a successful grab for the reader’s attention on the first page and maintains that momentum all the way through to its satisfyingly ambiguous finish.