For many of my contributions this year to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books I am focussing on the books I read 20 years ago in 1992.
By then my reading diet was almost exclusively crime fiction, with the occasional foray into thrillers.
By then my reading diet was almost exclusively crime fiction, with the occasional foray into thrillers.
So my recent posts for this meme have largely been about authors and books that I "discovered" in that year.
Helen MacInnes was an author I remember enjoying and this book is in my records for September 1992.
Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)
The scene is Vienna, where an American art expert, Colin Grant, has been dispatched by a Texas millionaire to buy a painting by the Dutch master Ruysdael. He is instructed to get the painting "at any cost" but to keep his employer's name a secret. This seemingly simple assignment turns into a nightmare for Grant as he finds himself in the center of a conspiracy to unleash bloody international terrorism
The art world meets cloak-and-dagger intrigue in this Cold War thriller. A triumph of pacing from a veteran of the genre.
PRELUDE TO TERROR, published in 1978, was #1 in a series of 3 novels featuring Robert Renwick, written in the last years of the author's life, when she was already 70. She died shortly after the third was published.
About the author
Helen MacInnes (1907-1985) graduated from the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1928 with a degree in French and German. Working as a librarian, she married the classicist Gilbert Highet in 1932 and moved with her husband to New York in 1937.
2 comments:
I think Helen Macinnes' books are brilliant - so pleased to see they are being reissued at the moment (and for kindle!). Thanks for reminding me how much I enjoyed her books.
I will definitely be reading this one, Kerrie. I read MacInnes many MANY years ago and recently re-read ABOVE SUSPICION which I enjoyed yet again.
But don't remember reading PRELUDE TO TERROR, though with my memory, that doesn't mean all that much.
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