Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory (UK 2013)

From the Publisher:
Isolation and boredom can do strange things to people. After years and years of too much time on her hands, lonely housewife Margaret Tucker's mundane routine becomes smattered with odd behaviour.

Her husband, Bernard, is cold and distant. Spending most of his time in London with only infrequent visits back to the marital home, Margaret knows nothing about her husband's other life and has been all but discarded by the man she once loved.

When Margaret starts losing periods of time and cannot recall her actions she knows things have got to change. But just as she is beginning to rediscover herself, her husband's mysterious life once again collides with hers.

Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory. Macmillan / Bello, ISBN: 9781447244295 (April, 2013), 250 p., £16.99 (?).

Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory (USA 1990)

From the Publisher:
Bernard Tucker is the British government's most valued and talented secret agent. A cool, hard character whose life has become synonymous with espionage trickery, Tucker lives in his own clandestine world -- with a hidden marriage, several lovers, and a history of shady business with an amateur spy named Billy Ankers. It is only after Tucker's mysterious death that these separate lives become intertwined. Only then do his longtime co-workers, Warboys, Quint, and Lassiter, discover how relevant his surreptitious "other" life is to the private workings of his trade. His widow, Margaret, unknowingly provides the key to the whereabouts of critical classified documents -- documents that answer the mystery behind Tucker's two lives. In The Mask of Memory, the lives of even the most carefree of observers become entangled with potentially deadly government deeds.

Victor Canning is the author of over thirty novels, including The Rainbird Pattern, for which he won a Silver Dagger award from the Crime Writers' Association, and Doubled in Diamonds, Raven's Wind, The Melting Man, and The Doomsday Carrier.

Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory. Collier Books, ISBN: 0020182201 (May, 1990), Collier Spymasters Series, 259 p., $4.95.

Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory (USA 1976)

From the Publisher:
A DEADLY TRIANGLE ... AND A NATION'S DESTINY HUNG IN THE BALANCE
Commander Tucker A professional intelligence agent, he cared only for his country. He ignored his wife's needs, denied his own passions, buried every ounce of human feeling.

Margaret Tucker It had been years since she felt like a wife, a lifetime since she had been treated like a woman. When she met a strange young man on a deserted beach, every fiber of her physical being came shockingly to life.

Maximilian Dougall He was a man of primitive sensuality. He cared nothing for the coldly cerebral world of international political intrigue and was not concerned with the fate of a man whose life depended on secrecy.

Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory. Award Books, Award Espionage AR 1641, 256 p., $1.75.

Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory (UK 1974)

From the Publisher:
The strange love affair of the neglected wife of a high-ranking government security chief with an earthy, ambitious lover is enacted, unknown to them, against a background of Westminster power politics and the topical struggle of Trade Unions versus the State. Their personal, human predicament contrasts vividly with the drab anonymity of official practices.

But the high peak of this absorbing story poses the question to which every reader must give his own answer - how far, even to the point of murder, is an individual responsible for his own acts?

Abandoning nothing of his well-proven narrative skills and a mastery control of excitement and character creation, Victor Canning may fairly be said to have opened up a new dimension in his own particular genre.

The setting of this new novel is the coast of Devonshire, lovingly described.

Victor Canning: The Mask of Memory. Heinemann, ISBN: 0434107859 (October, 1974), 260 p., £2.90.