Hammond Innes · 1950 · thriller

Hammond Innes's 1950 thriller. A machine-tool salesman with a wrecked leg and a wartime interrogation he has never spoken about takes an order to Czechoslovakia, and finds he has been used to carry something across a closing border. The pursuit follows him south into Italy and up the slopes of Vesuvius, which is in eruption while the reckoning happens.

1. 1
   Pilsen

   Dick Farrell goes to Pilsen on ordinary engineering business, in a Czechoslovakia sliding shut behind the new frontier - and finds his firm's order has been cover for something else, which he cannot now disprove.

2. 2
   Milan

   Out across the border and down into Italy, Farrell reaches Milan with people following him who know more about his war than he has ever told anyone - including the interrogation in which, under torture, he talked.

3. 3
   Naples

   The trail leads to Naples and the villages on the mountain above it, where the man from his past is living under another name - and where an eruption has begun that the local people are watching with more resignation than alarm.

4. 4
   San Sebastiano

   At San Sebastiano the lava comes down on the village while the two men settle what happened in the war - Innes having stood in that street himself when Vesuvius rolled over it in 1944.