Michael Innes: Operation Pax (USA 2024)

From the Publisher:
In this chilling classic British mystery thriller, a Scotland Yard inspector and his sister search for her missing fiancé in a city of vanishing people.

Petty con man Alfred Routh thinks a place like Milton Manor outside Oxford will have something nice to steal. When he learns what is inside, however, he is desperate to steal away with his life...

Meanwhile, Sir John Appleby from Scotland Yard is headed to Oxford to help his sister Jane. Her fiancé, a war hero and promising academic, has gone missing and many are concerned for his safety. But he's not the only recent disappearance in the area.

As Appleby's investigation begins, things only get more bizarre. The trail of clues leads him and Jane through the city of Oxford to the grounds of Milton Manor and the terrifying secrets within...

Originally published as The Paper Thunderbolt.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. An Inspector Appleby Mystery. Open Road Integrated Media, ISBN: 9781504092302 (May, 2024), 370 p., $28.99.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax (USA 2023)

From the Publisher:
In this chilling classic British mystery thriller, a Scotland Yard inspector and his sister search for her missing fiancé in a city of vanishing people.

Petty con man Alfred Routh thinks a place like Milton Manor outside Oxford will have something nice to steal. When he learns what is inside, however, he is desperate to steal away with his life...

Meanwhile, Sir John Appleby from Scotland Yard is headed to Oxford to help his sister Jane. Her fiancé, a war hero and promising academic, has gone missing and many are concerned for his safety. But he's not the only recent disappearance in the area.

As Appleby's investigation begins, things only get more bizarre. The trail of clues leads him and Jane through the city of Oxford to the grounds of Milton Manor and the terrifying secrets within...

Originally published as The Paper Thunderbolt.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. An Inspector Appleby Mystery. Open Road Integrated Media, ISBN: 9781504088282 (June, 2023), eBook, 3 MB (ca. 370 p.), $14.99.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax (2001)

From the Publisher:
A two-bit con-man is thrown in at the deep end as a desperate hunt takes place in Oxford, in this gripping tale whose thrilling climax takes place in the vaults of the Bodeleian.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. House of Stratus, ISBN: 1842327518 (January, 2001), 346 p., $18.95, £8.99.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax (UK 1990)

From the Publisher:
Something rich and rotten is going on behind the discreet fagade of a very private Oxfordshire clinic.
On the well-kept lawns of Milton Manor inmates enjoy a game of Croquet; on the terraces a dreamy little boy plays with some miniature poodles. Blundering over the wall and on the scene by accident, petty fraudster Routh can scarely believe his luck. He's on the razzle, on the run, Could this be his chance to join the big boys at last?

Meanwhile Sir John Appleby has been summoned to Oxford to investigate the disappearance of an undergraduate from Bede's. Almost accidentally, he too stumbles on the sinister secret of Operation Pax...

'Kept me palpitating from start to finish...more than a first-class thriller -- it's a good novel. With Routh, the furtive but ineffectual thief, Innes out-Simenons Greene!' - Daniel George

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. Penguin Crime Classic, ISBN: 0140115161 (December, 1990), 320 p., £3.99.

Michael Innes: The Paper Thunderbolt (USA 1987)

From the Publisher:
Hidden deep in the country, there is a dark, sinister laboratory...
And Routh, a man accustomed to the most meager of life's pleasures, discovers there a secret that can bring him untold wealth and power. But only if he can elude his captors and navigate the very treacherous path back to the heart of London.

"A master -- he constructs a plot that twists and turns like an electric eel: it gives youa shock - and you cannot let go." -- The Times Literary Supplement

Michael Innes: The Paper Thunderbolt. A Sir John Appleby Mystery. Select Penguin, ISBN: 014010089X (August, 1987), 333 p., $3.95.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax (UK 1984)

From the Publisher:
Milton Porcorum lies at the heart of a territory that Michael lnnes has made his own, where stately country houses harbour strange secrets: and none of them stranger than the one that's uncovered here. Milton Manor Clinic is guarded by high walls, electrified fences, free-roaming lions; and it's as difficult to escape from as to break into. And if by good luck and quick thinking someone does escape, then, as Routh, the shabby, frightened little swindler, discovers, Milton's long arm can still stretch out to grab him, in whatever unlikely setting he tries to hide -- a children's performance of Dick Whittington, or an upper floor at the Bodleian.

But at the Bodleian Routh unwittingly picks up some resourceful allies, notably Jane Appleby, the young, romantic and impulsive sister of the great Sir John Appleby, who is Scotland Yard's Assistant Commissioner and Michael Innes's brilliant and long-established detective. And though he doesn't know it, he has other curious allies too -- a taxi-driver who passes himself off as a Lord (or is he a Lord passing himself off as a taxi-driver?); and Professor Bultitude, who's as rotund and orotund as his name, and a gaggle of Oxford schoolboys (and not forgetting Dick Whittington's cat). And, of course, Sir John himself. The secret of the Milton Manor Clinic is monstrous; the annihilation of the place is total (though only after a breath-catching battle of nerves and wits); and now the Secret might well be lost for ever (or thereabouts), somewhere in the Bodleian's several million books. Altogether, a compendium of high spirits, nameless horrors, superb Oxford characters, grim tension and irrepressible fun.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. Victor Gollancz, ISBN: 0575034300 (May, 1984), 304 p., £7.95.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax (UK 1969)

From the Publisher:
A tale of scientific devilry told with a punch that rivets the attention from start to finish. The antics of a seventy-shilling con-man, on the run in Oxford, lead Appleby and the police inside the ring fence of a grandiose criminal plot.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, Penguin Crime No. C2203, 315 p., 30p 6/-.

Michael Innes: The Paper Thunderbolt (USA 1966)

From the Publisher:
"The World Turned Upside Down"
A seedy little con man panics. A highly placed, but impulsive muscle-man exceeds his authority. A wonderful, wild, pulses-pounding chase occurs. Enter, from quite another direction, Sir John Appleby of Scotland Yard, come up to Oxford to help a young sister, who has misplaced an extremely valuable fiancé.

Paths cross. And recross, Only the unexpected takes place. In the bowels of the Bodleian Library, for instance.
Very rare vintage. Enjoy it.

"An astounding mixture of wit, excitement, and thrill, and well blended it is, too." -- New York Herald Tribune

Michael Innes: The Paper Thunderbolt. An Inspector Appleby Mystery. New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1966, Berkley Medallion Book No. X-1205, 271 p., 60¢.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax (UK 1966)

From the Publisher:
A tale of scientific devilry told with a punch that rivets the attention from start to finish. The antics of a seventy-shilling con-man, on the run in Oxford, lead Appleby and the police inside the ring fence of a grandiose criminal plot.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, Penguin Crime No. C2203, 315 p., 5/-.

Michael Innes: Operation Pax (UK 1964)

From the Publisher:
Chucking a seventy-shilling con-man in at the deep end of crime, Michael Innes takes the hunt to Oxford, where the mad are indistinguishable from the sane.

'Kept me palpitating from start to finish... more than a first-class thriller - it's a good novel. With Routh, the furtive but ineffectual thief, Innes out-Simenons Greene. The type has never been so well studied' - Daniel George

'Highly ingenious... . Smashing climax in the vaults of the Bodleian and all sorts of delicious nostalgia-making detail about Oxford and its elaborate hierarchy of learning' - Maurice Richardson in the Observer

'A splendid assortment of University characters in all their charm' - New Statesman

Michael Innes: Operation Pax. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964, Penguin Crime No. C2203, 315 p., 4'6.