book cover of A Frenzy of Merchantmen
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A Frenzy of Merchantmen

(1977)
(An Act of War)
(A book in the Brevet Cable series)
A novel by

 
 
The second of two Callison cliff hangers featuring Brevet Cable, reluctant hero of 'A Plague of Sailors' and the most irregular merchant seaman ever to sail during the Cold War, as he plunges yet again into a further calamitous adventure.

Tension reaches breaking point in the Norwegian Sea where a British frigate has clashed with a Soviet merchantman with tragic results. In retaliation the Russians close the Baltic to UK shipping but the Admiralty sends a freighter called 'British Venturer' - under her newly-promoted Captain Cable - to test the Reds' resolution. Or so it seems. And so Cable believes.

But only when his ship has been savaged by the Soviet Navy and impounded in the Baltic port of Ahldenstadt while he's contemptuously deported back home, does Cable discover that the world's worst nightmare has only just begun - that the apparently innocuous merchantman he'd commanded conceals a threat more horrific, more destructive than any aircraft or missile-borne weapon could deliver. But then events move quickly on the international diplomatic scene ... so he's ordered to go and get it back!

Whereupon, under cover of an ingeniously fomented neo-Nazi uprising, an ever more disillusioned Cable returns to East Germany on a mission of explosive violence, with the lives of millions as the price of failure.

'His best action-packed novel to date.' Yorkshire Post.


Genre: Thriller

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