Dated but a good story

I agree with the previous reviewer but, having come out of the womb in 1947 as a fully fledged womens libber pre the 1960s, I wanted to shake the female protagonist whenever she played the little woman. The narration wasn’t bad apart from mispronouncing Magdalen College and it suited the the novel. I read most if not all of Helen MacInnes’s books in the 1960s and was pleased they had been reissued in audiobook form. Sadly, like Mary Stewart’s novels, they are dated and tend to make one wince on occasion but it’s good to travel back in time and as R Griffiths wrote it makes a refreshing change to be spared a lot of bad language and cringeworthy violence.

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Great story - an old favourite returns!

I love Helen Macinnes books and it's great to see Audible releasing several of them this year. Her style of writing may be a little old fashioned now but the stories are great and full of intrigue but mercifully without the gory detail so common in modern thrillers.
Here a young couple are drawn into espionage just as World War 11 is starting and Macinnes paints a chilling picture of France, Germany and Austria as they follow a chain of clues to find a missing agent.

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1 person found this helpful

A disappointment after Assignment in Brittany

Some words come to mind: naive, innocent, wordy, sentimental. A bit too Left Book Clubbish as well: Germans are mainly evil Teutons and square heads. The Oxbridge types are brave, principled and true (huzzah, huzzah!). It’s as if P G Wodehouse had been asked to write a serious thriller- it doesn’t really work. But then if Wodehouse had written it, he would have made Honoria Glossop the main protagonist and she would have sorted things out in the first 50 pages…

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Of its time

This was MacInnes’s 1st novel, published in 1941. It is of its time: a visceral hatred of things German, a dim witted heroine prone to hysterics (cured by husband slapping her smartly in the face) and preoccupied with her hair and makeup - even though she is brave enough under duress. It is a sort of boys’ own adventure in Germany just before war breaks out with Nazism omnipresent. So interesting from the point of view of seeming how people felt at the time. Not as accomplished as she went on to be in later novels.

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