Helen MacInnes

A phone call prompts Bill Lammiter, a young American playwright, to follow a former girlfriend to Rome. A kidnapping, a battle in a Renaissance villa, a shrewd gamekeeper, a chance snapshot and a touring preppy contribute to the excitement and suspense of this Cold War thriller....

American diplomat Payton Pleydell and his wife Sylvia are the most respected, brilliant couple in Washington. Theirs seems a perfect marriage, but Kate Jerold begins to suspect that her cousin’s husband is not as devoted as he seems....

English girl Sheila Matthews accepts an invitation to holiday in Poland, the country where her father died in mysterious circumstances. When German bombers begin pounding Warsaw, she decides against returning home and is recruited by the Polish underground....

British soldier Peter Lennox, a POW in an Italian prison camp, is still fighting his own war. An artist in civilian life, his hands bear the scars of wounds received during his capture at the fall of Tobruk, and he suspects he will never paint again....

For Nina O’Connell, a trip round the world was the holiday of a lifetime. Traveling in a group led by the attractive James Kiley and his friend Tony Shawfield, she is surprised when she runs into an old flame on a sunny Amsterdam street....

In a quiet London pub, Bob Renwick, founder of counter-terrorist agency Interintell, is handed a list of names. The Minus List has been compiled by the ruthless executive of an international munitions firm, engaged in training terrorists and arms dealing....

Irina Kusak’s recently divorced husband, Jiri Hrádek, is a high-ranking official in the Czechoslovakian secret police: cruel, ambitious, utterly ruthless. So when he turns a blind eye to her defection to the West, she is uneasy....

New York art expert Colin Grant is sent to Vienna and bid on a priceless Old Master on behalf of a Texan millionaire....

Under the Mediterranean sun, a drama begins in a café in Málaga. For Ian Ferrier, an employee of the United States Space Agency on holiday to visit his old friend Jeff Reid, it means the discovery that Reid is not just a wine exporter, but smuggling communist defectors to the West....

Chuck Kelso is an idealist. When he steals a top-secret NATO memorandum, he only intends to leak it to the press; but it is soon in the hands of a Russian agent, a man who has spent nine years quietly working himself into the fabric of Washington society. Within hours it has reached the KGB....