Helen MacInnes' Prelude to Terror

Colin Grant is an art critic. He's recently moved to New York City to work at the Schofeld Gallery. A woman in the art world he knows approaches him on the behalf of millionaire art collector Victor Basset. Could he buy a painting at an auction in Vienna on Mr. Basset's behalf? The painting is a river scene by Salomon von Ruysdael of 1642. It might go for a $200,000, but Basset is worried he has a rival and if it were known Basset was bidding the price would go up.

There's an additional complication. The owner is a Hungarian national who wants to get out of Hungary (this is the 1970s) with this painting that the government would cheerfully confiscate if they knew about it. So for both those reasons it all needs to be hush-hush.

Of course it's Helen MacInnes so there are more complications than that...

This is the first of three spy novels by MacInnes which feature Robert Renwick. He's in Vienna working on a money-laundering scheme run from Eastern Europe. The money's being used to finance terrorist activity in the West. (The Red Army Faction had been in the news in the 70s.) 

I thought this was one of the better MacInnes books. It is fairly dark for MacInnes, though. This is her first novel after her husband Gilbert Highet died. Grant is a widower still in grief when it starts; if you know MacInnes, you won't be surprised that as an American dragged into a spy story, he will be involved in a romance. It doesn't pan out in this one.

It's possible I read this when it came out--both my parents were MacInnes fans--but if so I didn't remember it.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1978). Painting. Is that a von Ruysdael river scene on the left of the cover?