Triple Threat: Above Suspicion / North from Rome / Double Image

by Helen MacInnes

Triple Threat by Helen MacInnes

309 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1973

About the author

Helen MacInnes was a Scottish-American author of espionage novels. She graduated from the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1928 with a degree in French and German. A librarian, she married Professor Gilbert Highet in 1932 and moved with her husband to New York in 1937 so he could teach classics at Columbia University. She wrote her first novel, Above Suspicion, in 1939. She wrote many bestselling suspense novels and became an American citizen in 1951.

Reviews

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ultimate suspense novel that truly ticks all the boxes, a pulse racing read begins in Paris--'April in Paris, and a sprinkle of rain, a sudden whip of cool breeze, a graying sky to end the bright promise of the evening. John Craig decided that his saunter along the Boulevard Saint-Germain might come to a quick end any moment now, and he began looking in earnest for a place of retreat.' Who John, simply a tourist headed towards Greece intent on writing a book on ancient trade routes, meets on the street suddenly leads to all kinds of trouble for him and the agents he encounters by chance at his sister and brother-in-law's hotel suite, agents on the lookout for cold war espionage, a "big man" orchestrating the shutting down of NATO offices in Turkey, in Smyrna. This is a novel flush with spying and keen intelligence work involving agents from France, Greece, Australia and America with a couple of Brits leading the 'job'. The characters are a full cast of mixed and varied bright, talented, endearing men and women from France to the Aegean islands and, especially, Mykonos--'They came to Mykonos in a blaze of pink and vermillion sky, with feathered sweeps of cirrus clouds so high that they had already shaded into gray leaving the last golden glow to the threatening mass of cumulus on the north horizon.' Picturesque, indeed, and extremely dangerous as the ending plays out for this high-stakes thriller. Our hero John, unlikely at first but comes into his own alongside the veterans-Rosie, Yves, Mimi and others. Published in 1966, this book is a gem, still very entertaining in plot, subject manner, quaint styles and customs and, most enjoyable, the travel from Paris to Greece, all safe and sound from our armchairs! MacInnes delivers, and how.