Vengeance in Venice — Kenneth Benton

City of light. City of shadows.

After masterminding a daring coup to smuggle a Soviet scientist out of Yugoslavia, Peter Craig and co-conspirator Jane Grayshott take a well-earned holiday with romance in mind, blissfully unaware that their escapades have ruffled some very important feathers in the KGB.

As the happy couple discover the ancient, romantic city, they are stalked by Mayrhof, a ruthless KGB assassin and his local recruit, an anarchist mercenary with an agenda of his own.

Craig's swansong brings him up against his most determined and personal opponent yet, in a city where danger and subterfuge lurk just beneath the surface.

"Benton is one of those leisurely Englishmen who has a civilised, cultured style, and who knows how to get the reader involved in a complicated chess game of competing secret agencies."
-- New York Times Book Review, 1972 (from a review of Spy in Chancery)