Hammond Innes · 1996 · global

Hammond Innes's last novel, published in 1996 nearly sixty years after his first. A scrap metal consultant is in Romania in the exact days Ceausescu falls, and a killing on the Black Sea coast sets him looking for a dissident's adopted daughter. The search runs from the Danube delta through Istanbul and Karachi to the high plateau of the Pamirs.

1. 1
   Constanta

   Paul Cartwright is at the Black Sea port of Constanta buying scrap when the first killing happens - and finds himself inside the Romanian revolution of 1989, in a country unsure which way the army will jump.

2. 2
   The Danube delta

   The delta is a country of reed channels, fishing villages and smuggling routes where the river runs out into the Black Sea - and where a great deal has always moved that the authorities preferred not to see.

3. 3
   Bucharest

   In Bucharest the Securitate are shooting into crowds and the regime falls in a week, and among the confusion Cartwright loses the trail of Vikki, the adopted daughter of a dissident journalist, who has gone east.

4. 4
   Istanbul

   Across the Black Sea to Istanbul, the hinge between Europe and everything east of it, where the trail passes into a different kind of trade and Cartwright finds he is following people who are also being followed.

5. 5
   Karachi

   On to Pakistan and Karachi, and then north toward the frontier - a journey that takes an ordinary businessman a very long way past the point where going home was still an option.

6. 6
   The Pamirs

   The last stage is on foot through blizzards into the high valleys of the Pamir, a place of isolated communities and unmapped passes - and Innes ends a sixty-year career with a mountain journey and a palace coup.