Mills / by Manning O'Brine [first edition]

One of the most famous spy stories to come out of the 1960's Cold War. Mills is a British agent - until he decides to pact it in. But agents can't just decide to pack it in. For one thing, the boss is likely to take a dim view of one of his highly trained men going off into the blue with his brain full of heaven knows how much classified information. For another thing, the heads of other secret organizations are liable to suspect that an agent who behaves in this way may have another motive in mind - treason, for instance. So when Mills "retires" to Italy, to revisit San Martino, he finds that he has become a quarry - pursued by Russians and Americans as well as by his own colleagues. Like most agents, Mills is not without resources and is highly skilled at this life and death game. Never before, however, has he had to play it with a partner such as Mairhi Odell. He meets her by chance, but his involvement with her is soon more than casual. Mills' story really begins in San Martino, a small mountain village which was the wartime scene of a savage German reprisal for a partisan raid led by Mills. Appropriately it is at San Martino that the climax of the story comes when the hunters and the hunted meet, and Mills gambles with his future and Mairhi's. Padraig Manning O'Brine (1913-1974) was an Irish thriller writer and screenplay writer. He wrote more than 100 TV scripts to his credit including "The Saint". During WWII, he served in France with the Resistance, then in North Africa as a secret agent. In 1943, he was parachuted into Montenegro to join the partisans and finished the War with the Garibaldi partisans in Italy. Manning wrote eleven books all concerning fictional secret agents.