"Mr Kemp―I believe you smuggle art? I have a little proposition..."

It seemed like money for old rope. All Kemp had to do was arrange the smooth transportation of the works of art his wealthy patron was secretly buying on behalf of the Nicaraguan government across the frontier into Switzerland. And anything was preferable to London in January.

It started to go badly wrong when he woke up in a Zurich park with a bump the size of a burial mound on his head, minus the priceless Cezanne he'd been carrying. The very next day he ran into Harry Burroughs at the airport. Kemp suspected it wasn't just coincidence. For Burroughs was a fine-art dealer, and an even finer crook. If he was mixed up in all this, Kemp knew that from now on he would have to earn his money―the hard way...

Gavin Lyall (1932-2003) lived in Hampstead and enjoyed sailing on the Thames in his motor cruiser. From 1959 to 1962 he was a newspaper reporter and the aviation correspondent for the Sunday Times. His first novel, The Wrong Side of the Sky, was published in 1961, drawing from his personal experiences in the Libyan Desert and in Greece. Lyall left journalism in 1963 to become a full-time author, writing 17 novels before his death in 2003.