This is book 5 of the "David Audley" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

I've also got a general page on Anthony Price.

I've read this fairly recently, but I'm getting enough benefit from reading through in order that I'm going to read it again.

The first of the recruitment stories -- Paul Mitchell is pulled from being a harmless historian into being a cloak-and-dagger gun-wielding desperado (witness his actions in The Old Vengeful).

I'm on page 68, and there are 3 bodies so far in England. This may be the highest rate of collateral damage of any Audley book. They don't know it yet, but there was a body in France first of all. And so far they have no idea why, or who, or much of anything -- except that it relates to Charles Emerson's interest in something on the Somme battlefield in France.

In the end Paul Mitchell comes through spectacularly, and is instantly addicted to doing that kind of work. All the remaining characters survive except the main bad guy and his henchman. And the veterans tour gets a bit of near-excitement.

What was the plan? To blow up the summit meeting with about 100,000 pounds of explosives still left down there in tunnels, forgotten (only the Germans had known about them before). The WWII mystery added up to why the explosives were still there. I never did understand why Olliviere wanted to blow up the summit meeting, though. We may actually be supposed to believe he'd gone around the bend.