The Year of the Tiger

Higgins' twenty-forth book involves the cold war and the space race in 1962. Paul Chavasse is an agent with the Bureau, a section of the British Secret Intelligence Service. He is sent to Chinese-controlled Tibet to find and smuggle out a scientist, Karl Hoffner, living there under house arrest. Hoffner, a brilliant mathematician, has come up with a new concept of space travel infinitely superior to Russia's. Chavasse is, of course, eventually able to outrun, outshoot, and outwit his evil pursuers and save the day for the free world. Like his other novels, this one is loaded with action and adventure; it is Higgins at his best.