House of the Hunted, British novelist Mark Mills's fourth thriller, is a near-return to the Mediterranean setting of 2009's The Information Officer, moving north from Malta to the Côte d'Azur and the French Riviera. First, though, there's a flashback to Petrograd in 1919, as Secret Intelligence Service agent Tom Nash attempts to free his Russian love, Irina, from the Bolsheviks. The plan fails terribly; he barely escapes and later hears that Irina was killed.
Flash forward to 1935. Nash is now a successful travel writer--and part-time agent for the Foreign Office--with a lovely house on the French coast. It's idyllic: warm evenings, dinner parties with friends, past and present, and Lucy, the goddaughter he loves dearly. Then his beloved dog, Hector, disappears, followed by an attempt on his life in his own home. It takes all Nash's skills to overcome and kill his attacker, then dump the body from his boat into the sea. Who wanted him dead, and why? Who betrayed him--a close friend? "He hated them for the fear that had returned to his life... for what they had made him do."
Mills is very good at moving House of the Hunted along at a crisp, but unforced pace. Little by little, Nash begins to piece together a deadly plot that could harm him as well as the loved ones around him. Have his Russian enemies returned? Could Irina have survived? Pleasing echoes of John Creasey and Alan Furst can be heard in this atmospheric, well-written cat-and-mouse thriller. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher