Vanishing Point

      Victor Canning

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 discovers 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.