Written in his glory days, Maclean's gift to devise a brilliant and cunning plot is perhaps best represented by this book. This cold war story plunges right into the action and keeps it's pace throughout the book. Although the main focus is rocket science and pretty advanced stuff at that, he manages to present the facts in a digestible, straight forward way. This book coincided with the age of rising interest in solid fuel rocketry among the scientific community. (You can learn more more about solid fuel rockets here or here.)
Rocket fuel expert and intelligence agent John Bentall is sent to investigate the mysterious disappearances of 8 of Britain's leading rocket scientists. At the same time, 9 mysterious advertisements crop up in the newspapers. He and the agent Marie Hopeman, posing as his wife, travel to Sydney on acceptance of the ninth advertisement. However, they are kidnapped en route to Sydney at Fiji and made captive on board a schooner (which is a ship by the way). They are then deftly manipulated by the kidnappers and end up on an island supposedly by accident. Their host on the island who takes good care of them is a well respected archaeologist, seems to be a pleasant man, but our hero feels otherwise. He suddenly finds himself in the midst of desperate men and a game of deceit. The stakes of which are very high, world domination, no less.
John Bentall is quite a bit different from Maclean's other protagonists, he displays an excessively self depreciating character and makes mistakes which play the duo right into the trap set by the villains. Marie Hopeman, his companion, doesn't play a major role here and the romance between them was a bit out of place. The main villain is cast as an exceptionally brilliant character and he was, for a change, a memorable one.
What I absolutely loved was that he gave emotional and human touches to even the secondary characters in the plot, which is not something you see in every other book.
The only thing I didn't like in this book was that Maclean cast Asians to be the villains in the plot. He cast them both as the foot soldiers and as the evil mastermind behind the whole plot. It was probably due to the bad 'encounters' he had with the Asians in WWII. But I did notice that he uses his books one too many times to foil them. I let the matter rest, we all have our mindsets.
All in all, this a great read provided that you are willing to suspend your disbelief just a little bit.
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John Bentall is quite a bit different from Maclean's other protagonists, he displays an excessively self depreciating character and makes mistakes which play the duo right into the trap set by the villains. Marie Hopeman, his companion, doesn't play a major role here and the romance between them was a bit out of place. The main villain is cast as an exceptionally brilliant character and he was, for a change, a memorable one.
What I absolutely loved was that he gave emotional and human touches to even the secondary characters in the plot, which is not something you see in every other book.
The only thing I didn't like in this book was that Maclean cast Asians to be the villains in the plot. He cast them both as the foot soldiers and as the evil mastermind behind the whole plot. It was probably due to the bad 'encounters' he had with the Asians in WWII. But I did notice that he uses his books one too many times to foil them. I let the matter rest, we all have our mindsets.
All in all, this a great read provided that you are willing to suspend your disbelief just a little bit.
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