Victor Canning: The Whip Hand (UK 2021)

From the Publisher:
The thrilling first novel in the classic Rex Carver mysteries, from the author of The Rainbird Pattern.
Meet Rex Carver, the suave and laconic 1960s London private investigator.

It starts with an easy job: Carver agrees to track down a German au pair, Katerina Saxmann, who has gone missing in Brighton. But when the security services show up at his apartment within hours of him accepting the assignment, he realises there is far more going on.

As the search leads Carver around the pleasure spots of Europe, the investigation, and his feelings for Katerina, get more complicated. But when a spectre from the continent's past rears its head, Rex realises he might be in too deep...

With cut-glass dialogue and panache in spades, Rex Carver is the James Bond of private investigators, perfect for fans of John le Carré and Ian Fleming.

Victor Canning: The Whip Hand. A Rex Carver Mystery. Canelo, ISBN: 9781800324206 (June, 2021), 1.46 MB (ca. 320 p.), £1.99

Victor Canning: The Whip Hand (UK 1965)

From the Publisher:
PRIVATE inquiry agent Rex Carver, hired to keep an eye on Katerina Saxmann, beautiful, blonde and German, soon finds that his secretary's intuitive doubts about the assignment are only too well justified. But, pressed by his bank manager, and not unimpressed with the charms of the luscious Katerina, Carver finds himself trailing his quarry across Europe from London to Paris, Venice and Yugoslavia. Katerina, ostensibly au pair companion to a wealthy Swiss woman, contrives to keep him posted on her movements, and, as agents from London, Bonn and Moscow join in the erratic paper chase, it soon becomes violently evident that this is no girlish frolic. What is the secret of the impeccably Teutonic Katerina? What is the nature of the unsavoury intrigue which they all suspect she is leading them?

Here, in this fast-moving, seat-edge thriller is the Victor Canning we know. His fine feeling for background, the unflagging tautness and suspense of plot, his eminently human odd-ball characters, clearly reveal him as a born story-teller. Since his first novel in 1934 he has written no less than twenty-eight best-sellers, countless magazine contributions and thrown in for good measure, script work in Hollywood and England. In spite of his prodigious output he still finds time to run a small poultry farm with his family in Kent. The Whip Hand is his latest novel and shows once again that his brilliant reputation in the spy-thriller field is thoroughly well-deserved.

Victor Canning: The Whip Hand. London: Heinemann, 1965, 239 p., 18/-.