Levkas Man

Hammond Innes

нов 2016. · Open Road Media

O ovoj e-knjizi

The tale of an archaeological dig gone terribly wrong from “Great Britain’s leading adventure novelist” (Financial Times).

When his parents died, Paul was sent to Amsterdam to live with his mother’s old lover, the eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort. Paul became a man in that cramped, strange house, cooped up with skeletons, fossils, and his increasingly mad guardian, who was obsessed with the search for the origins of man.
 
Finally, Paul can take no more. He hops a freighter and spends eight years at sea before returning home to find Van der Voort gone—and a mystery waiting in his place.
 
Van der Voort is in Greece on an archaeological expedition that’s spiraling out of control. The last place Paul wants to be is at the old man’s side, but he feels something drawing him toward the dig site. To reach Greece, he takes a job working for a smuggler, embarking on a journey that will carry him across the globe—and into the blackest depths of history.
 
A rip-roaring archaeological adventure in the spirit of Indiana Jones, Levkas Man is a story about the fundamental desire that has defined all human history: the irresistible urge to kill.
 

O autoru

Hammond Innes (1913–1998) was the British author of over thirty novels, as well as children’s and travel books. Born Ralph Hammond Innes in Horsham, Sussex, he was educated at the Cranbrook School in Kent. He left in 1931 to work as a journalist at the Financial News. The Doppelganger, his first novel, was published in 1937. Innes served in the Royal Artillery in World War II, eventually rising to the rank of major. A number of his books were published during the war, including Wreckers Must Breathe (1940), The Trojan Horse (1940), and Attack Alarm (1941), which was based on his experiences as an anti-aircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain.

Following his demobilization in 1946, Innes worked full-time as a writer, achieving a number of early successes. His novels are notable for their fine attention to accurate detail in descriptions of place, such as Air Bridge (1951), which is set at RAF stations during the Berlin Airlift. Innes’s protagonists were often not heroes in the typical sense, but ordinary men suddenly thrust into extreme situations by circumstance. Often, this involved being placed in a hostile environment—for example, the Arctic, the open sea, deserts—or unwittingly becoming involved in a larger conflict or conspiracy. Innes’s protagonists are forced to rely on their own wits rather than the weapons and gadgetry commonly used by thriller writers. An experienced yachtsman, his great love and understanding of the sea was reflected in many of his novels.

Innes went on to produce books on a regular schedule of six months for travel and research followed by six months of writing. He continued to write until just before his death, his final novel being Delta Connection (1996). At his death, he left the bulk of his estate to the Association of Sea Training Organisations to enable others to experience sailing in the element he loved.