Assignment in Andorra — May Mackintosh

The vivid setting of May Mackintosh's new novel of suspense and adventure is in the tiny principality of Andorra, perched in the splendid isolation high among the towering Pyrenees between Spain and France. To this unlikely spot Laurie Grant and her fiance', investigator Stewart Noble, have come at the urgent bequest of Stewart's friend, a young jeweler worried about the pickpocketing and petty thievery that threaten to discourage the tourist trade that is the tax- and duty-free little country's chief source of income. But even before their arrival the jeweler has been robbed and murdered, leaving a shocked Laurie and Stewart to solve the crime.

In the course of a dangerous investigation, Laurie is fired upon during a strange chamois hunt, two other murders occur, attempts are made on Stewart's life, the existence of an intricate and pervasive smuggling ring is exposed, and the story's locale shift to Boston and Chicago, where proof of yet another murder is uncovered. In a shattering climax, Laurie and her fiance are confronted by the murderer during a macabre, cat-and-mouse manhunt carried out in the midst of a snowstorm that swirls and gusts in and around Andorra's treacherous mountain peaks and passes.

As I crouched half frozen, close to the ground, it seemed suddenly incredible that I should be here, harried, cold and terrified high in the mountains of an alien land. Impossible to believe that my situation now had anything to do with the opulent comfort of Sprungli's, with American lucite bathtubs, with swizzle sticks shaped like camellias, and with the stiff brocaded figures of the Three Kings from the East. It was a long, cold way from golden fireflies in the dusk and the newfound peace in a seventeenth-century Tuscany bed.


Also published as: A Queen and Two Kings