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.

I have no idea what it was about this book but it was not for me.

The book was off to a great start with its unusual setting for a spy story that starts in rural Bulgaria, but then it seemed to loose its way for me. 

It may have been Furst's attempt at writing a kind of panopticon that would show the different theatres of world history that were affected by the story in parallel that didn't work for me, or maybe it was because Furst's writing reminded me of Ken Follett's (who tried to pull of a similar overview of all the events in different locations in Fall of Giants ... God, I hated that book!) that put me off, but I just could not get invested in the story ... or the characters. 

So, in the end, I finished the book, shrugged, and moved on.

Still wishing he'd get on with it.

I'm seriously considering DNF'ing this. The book lost all of it's thrill for me about a hundred pages in and it's not found it again since. 

I really don't care about any of the characters, the writing reminds me of Follett (that is not a compliment in my book), and what is worse, I'm not looking forward to picking this up again tomorrow night to find out what the ending will be.