41. Stalking Point by Duncan Kyle

It's always a pleasure to find a new Duncan Kyle in the wild.  This one came with the Plattsburgh book haul.  It's not fair, but I like to refer to him as the poor man's Desmond Bagley.  He wasn't as consistently successful and his books are a bit more varied in subject matter which I think made him less marketable.  Personally, I find his writing to be somewhat more clinical and less visceral than Bagley.  Nonetheless, he is a solid writer with inventive adventure situations and well-structured plots.

Stalking Point starts out with a backstory at the end of WWI where a young German pilot, Ernst Noll, just avoids execution for cowardice (he freaked out his first flight when surprised by British fighters, abandoned his formation and left his decorated commander to get shot down).  He is shunned by his family, especially his patriotic father and pregnant wife and so makes his way to South America to start anew.  

Decades later, he is a new man, Ernie Miller, and we are in the middle of a new war. It's 1941 and America is still neutral.  The narrative dances around here and gets complex and interesting.  Alexander Ross, expert pilot but too old to fight is sent to Los Angeles to work on a secret mission to be the pilot for some new sub-detecting equipment.  He hires Ernie, who has mistakenly exposed himself to a keen, patriotic secretary at the German consulate in San Francisco.  She drags him into a plot by her boss, a bitter ex-pilot sent to work the bureaucracy because of a limp, to suicide bomb the secret meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill.

There is a lot going on in the first half of the book and the pages keep turning as we follow several storylines, including real high-ranking historical figures (Canaris, Donitz and others).  It's a lot of fun with a couple of neat little asides (particularily memorable is when two spies get pulled over by a zealous polish-American small town sheriff who rightly guesses they are up to shenanigans and almost has them but takes a contemptuous swipe at an explosive package).  The last quarter involves a long range airplane pursuit across Quebec to Newfoundland and while cool, it was also kind of a downer and the ending a bit of an anti-climax.  I appreciated its efficiency but there wasn't even a denouement so it felt a bit empty and sad.  It's still a solid read, though I would have to put in the lower ranks of Kyle's works.