This tale of Andrew Taylor’s hasn’t yet been reissued like other of his earlier works. I tracked down a secondhand copy to give it a try. I can see why it hasn’t made a reissue as it’s not as mystery based as his other work. I enjoyed it all the same.

Hugh is a young teenager in London, somewhere before the start of the second world war and he’s just been expelled from school. His bullying father is recruited to do some kind of Secret Service mission to Prague and ends up taking Hugh with him. The mission is never going to succeed and Hugh ends up stuck in Prague with a false identity while his awful father goes home happily without him. It’s a good start to a story and I thought it was going to be more of a children’s book for a while, but it isn’t.

The story does go a bit all over the place, it doesn’t fit as a mystery, or as a spy story but nor is it not one of those. I wouldn’t particularly recommend it to anyone as Taylor’s written lots of good books that you should read first, but I did enjoy this one all the same.