The Last Frontier by Alistair MacLean

British agent Michael Reynolds is captured in the blinding snow of the Hungarian countryside, facing certain death at the hands of the notorious AVO secret police. Reynolds is a superbly fit specialist for whom consequences do not exist, killing without compunction in any manner available. His mission is to find and return renowned scientist Howard Jennings, trapped behind the Iron Curtain with his wife and son. There is a window as he attends an international scientific conference in Budapest where Reynolds can attempt to extract him over the border—his family already orchestrated to safety in Sweden.

The Hungarian Political Police learned from Hitler's Gestapo, unmatched for heartless brutality, and at the AVO headquarters, Reynolds meets his captors. Masterminds of warfare after the October Rising, they specialize in psychological and physical torture—enough said, this reads as grim as the solitary cells underground.

Double agents are working on a plan concurrent to Reynolds, whose very tormentors could turn out to be allies. Reynolds breaks into Jennings' fortified hotel, rescues him from a cell in the notorious Szahaza Prison, and enacts the audacious plan to grab him from a moving military transport train filled with soldiers. On his trail is the sadistic AVO Colonel Hidas, the kind of man who would machine-gun a house to the ground, regardless of who was inside. Seemingly impossible scenarios follow each other, with cliffhanger escapes.

Alistair MacLean never disappoints, but this was cold and without levity. The background of the Hungarian Revolution and the bleakness of human cruelties were constant. With pages comparing the atrocities of death camps and nerve surgery torture techniques, this is serious Cold War fiction. Breathless and bloody, Lee Child has called this "one of the best post-war thrillers." Published as The Secret Ways in the US, it was the first MacLean novel to be filmed in 1961, starring Richard Widmark.

1959 / Tradeback / 416 pages