(Click
on the book to buy The
Tightrope Men from
Amazon.co.uk)
The Tightrope Men,
This
story starts with the almost science-fiction style opening
of a man waking up with someone elses face. After the
initial shock of seeing someone else looking back from his
shaving mirror, Giles Denison has to find out who he really
is and what he is doing in an Oslo hotel bedroom.
Luckily Harold Feltham Meyrick, his new persona, seems to
have a fairly healthy bank-balance and so there is no
immediate problem of being turfed out into the street.
Unfortunately there are plenty of people who are interested
in Meyrick and one by one Denison has to pick his way
through the mine- field of making their acquaintance. One
of the hardest to come to terms with is a daughter he never
knew he had.
There are car chases, femme fatales, a cat and mouse chase
through the northern Finnish nature reserve of the Sompio,
and an undercover mission from west to east in the search
for a hidden technological treasure. For years before, when
that part of Russia was still in Finland a scientist had
discovered a way of using X-ray lasers as a handy incoming
missile destroyer.