The timing couldn't have been worse. For on the day that Nicholas Marlow proposed marriage to his girlfriend Claire, he lost his job at the Barnton Heath Engineering Company. Two and a half months later, and with still no work in sight, Marlow is forced to accept a post in Milan for Spartacus Machine Tools.

But no sooner has he arrived in Italy than things start to go wrong: his passport goes missing, his mail is being read, and he is convinced he is being followed.

Marlow knows that his predecessor had been killed under the wheels of a car. But now he has been given a mysterious note which claims Ferning was murdered . . .

Written in 1938, Cause for Alarm is a classic chase thriller of an ordinary young man caught up in extraordinary events as the world hurtles towards war.