A Foreign Country: From the Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author, a compelling spy action crime thriller you won’t want to put down: Book 1 (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller)

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Find by Country Name: A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | Y | Z Regardless, I wrote a fairly long and gritty review for this book but in our current blizzard of the day conditions, the wi-fi cut out and it was lost. So now I'll just say it shortly. Which Charles Cumming never does, btw. Spies may begin their career out of loyalty to their country, or maybe for excitement, or maybe for the enticement of enrichment. As they do tasks for their country, they may discover that there are unsavory elements to what they are being asked to do. Maybe the line becomes blurred between who is right, or maybe it is more about who is most right. How about when your country asks you to do something, things go sideways, and then they hang you out to dry?

Since foreign countries are subjective based on your location, we thought we would explore two beautiful parts of the world that are less known about on a global scale. Here are some facts worth knowing about the European country of Andorra and the French territory of New Caledonia. Andorra Superb prose and also an occasional savvy, wise passage re the homo sapiens state in general. Although I have to admit I disagree with his dangerous age for men (he puts it at age 42) where the "big questions" of perception vs reality tend to combustion. With the much longer present "adolescence" of past age 25- it is now closer to 48. Or just before 50. Yeah. I should know better. Never trust a book by its sweet cover. That'll always bite you in the ass! It's delicious in placements. France, Egypt, England, Tunasia and more. I especially loved the narrations from different individuals upon the various French cities "feel". So pretentious and also IMHO- fairly dated and inaccurate. But it's brutal on occasion. Far more than just in the descriptive sense. Considering the body counts, I thought it rather droll that Kell is supposedly in a quiver over waterboarding! How self-rationalizing are humans!The book is filled with wonderful, authentic information on spycraft. Kell breaks information apart and finds new strings to pull until he inches closer and closer to the truth. Patience is a virtue with spycraft. Sometimes a good spy has to let the action come to him before the motivations of all parties become clear. Nothing is ever quite what it seems. The devil is in the details, and the nuances might prove to be the key to getting one step ahead of those who are trying to destroy his chance to be redeemed. Spies, of course, struggle with the idea of loyalty more than the rest of us do. Most of us might have to struggle to choose between two friends who are divorcing. Who is my better friend? Who deserves my support the most? We don’t generally have to think about our loyalty to our country or ever have it really tested. Here in the United States, it is always interesting to me when someone expresses loyalty to their state over that of the federal government, as if the issues surrounding the Civil War still linger in the minds of those descended from those who fought over states rights. Loyalty to a state is a nebulous idea for me. State lines, arbitrarily drawn at some point in history, don’t really have importance to me. Of course, it is hard for me to see myself as loyal to the United States by dint of my birth. I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world who just happens to live in the United States. The characters consist of tedious middle aged people in unhappy marriages. There's an unpleasant sneering tone to it all, for example; "The woman, bottle blonde and upholstered in white leather was far younger than her partner and wore the spoiled-milk look of a mistress growing tired of her role." Foreign countries are all of the countries that you do not live in, so if you reside in Somalia, then every country other than Somalia will be considered a foreign country in your eyes. So, there will always be someone who does not define a country that you view as foreign as foreign in their eyes.

Think about everywhere you have traveled to and all the different cultures you have experienced in doing so. This is another way of determining foreign countries versus ones you are familiar with, because if you base your definition of foreign off of whether or not you have been somewhere before, then your viewpoint on foreign countries will differ even more. The countries we are going to dive into a conversation about might not be foreign countries through your perspective, and that is a reality that can be hard to escape when talking about places in a subjective manner. Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice. The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks, and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. ‘The place,’ he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, ‘where suntans go to die.’” They shot me," he answered, with what I took to be a smile. "Yes, but that was in a war. Do they still shoot each other over ladies?" I imagined a carpet of prostrate women, over whom shots rang out.A Foreign Country is a poor attempt at international spy thriller that gets caught in its own idiosyncrasies, and never really develops either plot or characters. The really annoying thing is that the story really had potential, specially in the beginning! It all starts with an exciting trifecta: a kidnapping scene, a French couple gets brutally murder and there's a mysterious disappearance of the chief of Mi6. We, the readers, are led to believe that all these events will magically coalesce into an awesome harmony of events with thriller, action and high tech spying! Cumming is an excellent writer, and has a superb sense of dramatic tension, but in A Foreign Country – unlike some of his other novels – this reviewer was left with the feeling that he has not quite got the balance right, that the novel was a little rushed in its production, perhaps under pressure of a publishing deal. Mega burn! I hope the Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, doesn’t read this book. He might fling himself off the nearest balcony. Hopefully, he is considerate enough not to mar the too-clean streets with his mangled body, though. In A Foreign Country the truth is revealed relatively early, putting the reader in the intimate position of watching the concluding events with the knowledge that it is extremely unlikely that the hero will be outwitted. Too early perhaps – once this point of intimacy with the story (not just the hero) has been reached, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to push on through to the conclusion. The details (which Cumming is very good at painting) become less relevant and can be lost in the desire to reach the end. The exact circumstances of the denouement have still to be revealed of course, but there is less of a sense of mystery. We have all the pieces of the jigsaw, and they’re all in the right places – just the edges are fuzzy. From the internationally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of The Trinity Six, comes a compelling tale of deceit and betrayal, conspiracy and redemption