MOST SECRET

Thoroughly good reading, but not as widely appealing a book as Pastoral or Pied Piper, perhaps because, in cross sectioning a group of characters he does not cut quite as deeply into emotional levels as he was able to do in his greater concentration on individuals in these most popular of his books. Once again, he has set his story in the path of history in the making. He has used the secret weapon of fire as his motivation. He has built his plot around the wish on the part of a carefully selected few, highly individualized members of Britain's armed forces, who have a score to pay, who wish an escape in dramatic form, and whose imagination can be caught by the use of fire in revenge, in morale building, in destruction. A Breton fishing vessel, held in an English port, is used as the medium; a crew is made up of Free French and selected officers; the goal is the Channel off the coast of Brittany, where the Germans placed guard vessels over the impounded fishing fleets; the purpose, to bolster the morale of the underground resistance forces in one particularly recalcitrant village. There's a slim thread of romance; there are brief glimpses of tragedy; there's plenty of adventure; there is definitely less emotional impact, less appeal of sentiment. A good yarn, nonetheless.