Muriel Spark is easily the best living Scottish writer (though she has long lived in Italy) and has produced many brilliant novels (including Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Abbess of Crewe, The Only Problem, Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington), but this (1973) one rivals _The Driver's Seat_ (1970) for being her worst. It is an implausible and arbitrary tale of a well-to-do couple living in Manhattan who met in a counter-intelligence/propaganda program during World War II. The wife thinks she has seen a man who was a Nazi double agent working in a shoe store, though he was supposed to have died long ago.


I find it impossible to believe in or care about any of the characters in this typically short (139-page) Spark novel, and the ending rivals that of (her fellow convert to Catholicism) G. K. Chesterton's _The Man Who Was Friday_ for unsatisfactoriness. A side-plot on vaguely "shock the bourgeoisie" off-Broadway theater of the early 1970s adds more yawns, as does a ridiculout psychiatrist turned butler.

This novel from Spark's doldrum period deserves to stay out of print, whereas most of her novels from _The Abbess of Crewe_ (1974) through _Far Cry_ (1988) and her pre-1970s novels continue to provide pleasures and insights to readers and deserve to be in print and read.