Victor Canning: Vanishing Point (USA 1983)

From the Publisher:
Vanishing Point surpasses even Victor Canning's usual high standards: it is wickedly sophisticated with a gallery of characters that will linger long in the memory of the reader. Canning readers, as well as those yet to be introduced to his novels, will discover Vanishing Point to be one of his best-completely convincing, satisfying, and intriguing.

For Maurice Crillon, life ambles along in a more or less perfunctory manner. A man of some contradiction, Maurice is an artist of considerable talent and an accomplished restorer of fine paintings. His main occupation in life, however, is making high-quality forgeries of paintings. That and maintaining his various mistresses.

When Maurice's mother dies, he dis covers an intriguing and baffling fact about himself: he is not french, as he has always thought, but English, born of aristocratic blood.

A visit to his English father, an elderly, delightful eccentric, plunges Crillon into a series of complications reaching through France, Switzerland, and Italy. His curiosity about his parents entangles him in an adventure in which he unwittingly becomes the quarry of the security services of two nations as well as the Mafia, all of them bent on recovering certain incriminating documents that have fallen into his possession.

A thriller compounded of international intrigue, blackmail, unusual plotting, and suspense, Vanishing Point has all the usual Canning ingredients cleverly blended, full of charm, excitement, and romance, culminating in a wonderfully ironic climax.

Victor Canning: Vanishing Point. William Morrow, ISBN: 0688011071 (December, 1982), 200 p., $10.95.

Victor Canning: Vanishing Point (UK 1982)

From the Publisher:
MAURICE CRILLON - a brilliant French artist and art forger with a silver tongue and a silken touch with women - learns at his mother's death that his father was an English baronet. His curiosity to meet his parent entangles him in an adventure in which he unwittingly becomes the quarry for the security services of two nations as well as agents of the Mafia, all of them bent on recovering certain incriminating documents which have fallen into his possession.

Vanishing Point is a typically sophisticated Canning work, full of charm, excitement and romance, played out against English, Italian and Swiss backgrounds with a gallery of characters that will linger long in the memory.

Victor Canning: Vanishing Point. Heinemann, ISBN: 0434107972 (September, 1982), 200 p., £6.95.