Howling at the Moon

Description

Howling at the Moon tells the story of another disastrous adventure involving the pompous but entertaining retired British Diplomat Ambrose Bellingham who featured in the earlier Melrose Novel The Den of the Basilisk by the same Author. This time Ambrose is removed from the sleepy Norfolk village to take up a semi covert appointment in Transcarpathia, an Eastern European former communist state now struggling with the transition to democracy. Ambrose is to be tutor to the children of the former King, now returning with his somewhat unattractive family after a long exile. Ambrose's real job is to keep the whole lot on the rails and watch British interests. With his uncanny knack for calamity, Ambrose soon gets into appalling difficulties, heightened by his dubious past connection with this Balkan country. The complex story shows him escaping from some dreadful near disasters, only to find, eventually, that he is merely a pawn in a diabolically manipulative Foreign Office plot. The whole dramatic adventure is brimmed full of incident and character, as well as political chicanery and diplomatic scullduggary. There is a grin or a smirk on nearly every page plus a great many outright laughs. The author specialises in understated, well crafted sentences replete with comic irony.