That ending was a let-down.

Actually, ... this is almost exactly like Above Suspicion. 

If the party is captured and held in a castle in the Dolomites next, and if

, I'll not just be disappointed but really, really peeved.

It's a decent plot and I am enjoying it - it's perfect for a rainy Saturday. But,... there is a distinct lack of atmosphere.

There is still little that suggests that this story is set in the 70s not the 40s, there is is even less that suggests a sense of place. Telling readers that characters have travelled to Vienna or Salzburg does nothing to evoke what the places look like or feel like to the characters. 

I'm pretty disappointed in this regard, and I am now also wondering if this is something I somehow didn't notice when reading Above Suspicion because I had images of black and white movies to fall back on that were set in France and Germany in the 40s. 

It's not that I am lacking familiarity with the look of Vienna or Salzburg, it just that I am struggling with the way that this story is told in almost exactly the same style as a story set in the 1940s. The only difference so far is the frequency of air travel and the mention of several car makes. 

Hang on. When I read the first couple of pages, I thought This was set in the 1930s or 40s. But it isn't. This is set in 1974!!

The writing reminds me so much of Above Suspicion, tho, which is set in the 1940s.

So, now that I totally have to adjust my view with respect to context, let's see how MacInnes deals with the aftermath of the Prague Spring and the Cold War setting.

Ok, I'm probably going to fall asleep really soon, but before I do I am making a start on Snare of the Hunter as my next BL-Opoly pick. 

I didn't know which book to pick, but then Moonlight Reader made the choice really easy when she offered up a buddy read!

And what can I say? How is it possible not to be drawn right in by the first page?

A feeling of laziness, of a gentle slipping into sleep, spread over the fields as the July sun arced slowly downward, deepening in colour, yet losing intensity. Here, at the edge of the trees, the cool shadows of late afternoon turned into evening cold. Irina Kusak drew the cheap raincoat, dingy brown and as unobtrusive as her grey skirt and blouse, more tightly around her. The dark headscarf, which had hidden her fair hair all through the long day’s journey south, was now loose over her shoulders. She pulled it closely around her neck, shivering not so much from the deepening shadows of the wood as from her mounting anxiety and fear as she stared down over the long naked slope of grass to the barbed-wire fence. The boundary. And across it, on the other side, in another country, was a stretch of quiet narrow road, sandwiched between the barbed wire of Czechoslovakia and the hills of Austria.

Oh, and let me just make this clear, I'm taping a sticky note over part of that cover. There is no freaking way I am reading this book in bed with a big-ass spider on the cover. 

What kind of monster chose this cover design?