The summer soldier

Ray Guinness #1

by Nicholas Guild

One day in a quiet northern California college town, an English instructor comes home only to find police clustered around his modest home. His wife is dead, stabbed to death with an ice pick, and suddenly Ray Guinness realizes that his past has recaptured him.

277 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Nicholas Guild was born in Belmont, California in 1944. He graduated from Occidental College with a B.A. in English in 1966 and from the University of California at Berkeley with an M.A. in Comparative Literature (1968) and a Ph.D. in English (1972). Since then he has divided his time between teaching and writing. He currently lives in Frederick, MD.

Reviews

[Peter]

A 1978 spy/chase novel which still holds up well. American Ray Guinness is recruited as an assassin by the British (although the means by which he is recruited rings hollow). 40ish, retired and now a Californian English lecturer he arrives home to find his wife murdered and soon realises he is the target of a Soviet defector whose wife he inadvertently killed. The manhunt is tense, the details of some of his hits interesting, Guinness himself muses intelligently, and, although the showdown is a bit anti-climactic, it’s a good story. 3.5 stars

[Steve Goble]

This is a story of one predator hunting another, told in fairly tight prose and featuring some of the character depth and moral ambiguity to be found in the work of Graham Greene or John Le Carre. I would not rank it as highly as the work of those two gentlemen, but it was a good read and I will seek out more of Guild's spy novels.