Gavin Lyall

The battle-scarred Major Harry Maxim, Intelligence aide at Number 10 Downing Street, must find what links a deserting corporal, East German politics, a double killing in West Germany, a South London fight club, and a widowed Yorkshire piano teacher.

Peter Cheyney: Don't Get Me Wrong Gavin Lyall: Midnight Plus One Alistair MacLean: The Way to Dusty Death

Devlin saw the whiteness of fatigue and the thousand shocks that she had received written upon Catherine's face. He saw the fragile delicacy of her features. She was utterly vulnerable and Devlin had the instincts of the strong to protect the weak. He could no more have hurt her than flown. But Catherine only saw him as a prison warder - her bodyguard - and he didn't know what to tell her to make her feel differently. He understood fully why she should feel as she did. "You're tired," he said. He deliberately made his voice soothing. "You're very, very tired ..." "You want to make love to me, don't you?" she asked. "I can tell Devlin, you've looked at me and you want to make love with me!"

"When last we encountered Gabriel Allon, the master art restorer and sometime officer of Israeli intelligence, he had just prevailed in his blood-soaked duel with Saudi terrorist financier Zizi al-Bakari. Now Gabriel is summoned once more by his masters to undertake what appears to be a routine assignment: travel to Amsterdam to purge the archives of a murdered Dutch terrorism analyst who also happened to be an asset of Israeli intelligence. But once in Amsterdam, Gabriel soon discovers a conspiracy of terror festering in the city's Islamic underground, a plot that is about to explode on the other side of the English Channel, in the middle of London." "The target of this plot is Elizabeth Halton, daughter of the American ambassador to the Court of St. James's, who is to be brutally kidnapped. Gabriel arrives seconds too late to save her. And when he reveals his face to the plot's masterminds, his fate is sealed as well. Drawn once more into the service of American intelligence, Gabriel hurls himself into a desperate search for the missing woman as the clock ticks steadily toward the hour of her execution. The search will take him from Amsterdam to Germany to the very end of Denmark. It will thrust him into an unlikely alliance with a man who has lost everything because of his devotion to Islam. It will cause him to question the morality of the tactics of his trade. And it might very well cost him his life."--Jacket.

A fairly authentic flying based thriller, very definitely of its 1960s period . The plot concerns jewels missing for some 10 years which come to light in a wreck of a Douglas Dakota aeroplane on a Greek island. Some of the plot is over-involved and not entirely convincing , and the ending is rather weak , but this is a good light read on a rainy afternoon!