Adventure of State: A Novel of Espionage

Recently retired from a division of MI5, Col. Allen Cheyney hurries to London to learn a long-kept secret from a dying government official, Sir Harry Richmond. Cheyney is too late but circumstances lead him to suspect the secret must concern Sir Harry's son, Charlie, who disappeared on a mission behind the Iron Curtain a decade before. Reactivating himself to solve this mystery, Cheyney teams with James Lewis, a Scotland Yard detective whose expertise in dealing wtih the underworld Cheyney needs. Not only do these two trace Sir Harry's missing young lover, foil kidnappers and abort a murderous ambush but, like Holmes and Watson, they trace the final secret deductively, flushing a Kim Philby prototype. In his third Cheyney novel (Cheyney's Law; The Three Colonels, Cosgrove's narrative bounces like a ping-pong ball from one point of view to another, an effective device for building tension and for skipping past the improbable. A well-paced spy-fi with an ironic punishment for the traitor. February 24