A review by vsbedford
The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes

2.0

An Appleby mystery that contains but a wisp of Appleby and focuses, instead, on a 39 Steps/Rogue Male redux with a heartily annoying young woman whose knowledge of poetry and general toffee-nosed-ness gets her involved with some genuine nonsense in Scotland. Look, one of the positives of a Michael Innes novel is that it eschews that formulaic but here he rather over steers into the skid. As such, we end up on on the other side with almost a parody of this type of novel rather than a work itself. I recommend approaching this one as source material for an early Hitchcock and it gets better, if not by much.

I recevied an ecopy from the publishers and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.