At first blush, London Spy doesn’t appear to be a romance story, but it is. Hang with it and you’ll get there.
Danny is a gay man in a community of drug addicts. He also used to be an addict. But he’s also desperately looking for Mr. Right. Then he meets him and his name is Alex. Alex is about the opposite of Danny. Conservative, uptight, terrified that someone will learn about them, and yet deeply devoted to Danny.
The two men date and begin an intimate relationship in which it is obvious that Alex has never been intimate with another man. This becomes important later. Eventually Alex dumps Danny and not so kindly. He makes a date and then doesn’t show. Danny sees him with another man. Just as Danny is about to give up on Alex, he calls him and wants to be forgiven. When Danny goes to his apartment, he finds Alex dead inside of a trunk surrounded by S&M paraphernalia. Since Alex and Danny were never into S&M and Alex was new to gay sex, it seemed like a setup. And it was.
Immediately Danny learns that Alex was a spy, MI5. He also came from a very uptight wealthy family. While MI6 tries very hard to frame Danny for Alex’s murder, a lot of things don’t add up. So they get desperate and infect Danny with HIV. Yes, you read that right. They infect him with HIV and plant stories in the newspapers that he’s a drug addict so no one will listen to his stories that MI6 killed Alex.
Then the stories just ends. Very sad, very dark. The one good thing is that the more Danny digs into Alex’s murder the more he realizes that Alex really did love him.
7 out of 10 stars.
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