Birdcage Series by Victor Canning
Birdcage #2
The Rainbird Pattern
Victor Canning
The Rainbird Pattern catalogues a search for a highly professional kidnapper: a man who deals in public figures, but makes sure that no publicity attaches to the crime. The result is a secret and fascinating race between the calculating professionals and a bumbling and very unprofessional pair of amateurs, to find the kidnapper.The book is not, however, a commonplace tale of amateur versus professional sleuth. These amateurs deal in the occult, the search is both on land and in the world of the “spirits”. The conclusion is unpredictable and weird. An unusual book for the author and apart from its arbitary and imposed ending, a coldly fascinating experience.
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Birdcage #4
The Doomsday Carrier
Victor Canning
LOADED AND LETHAL—A LIVING TIME BOMB LOOSE IN THE WESSEX COUNTRYSIDE . . .Charlie is a specimen chimpanzee maintained by the Ministry of Defence for dubious experimental purposes. Soon after he has been injected with a devastating plague bacillus, he escapes. At first an innocent wanderer under summer skies, in only twenty-one days he will become infectious, and a population of millions will then be in hideous danger.Discreetly the authorities mount a full-scale search; but fearing the political and international consequences, they dare not reveal the sordid truth. As a result the search is compromised at every turn, while risks and tensions mount—to the very dawn of doomsday.
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Birdcage #5
Birdcage
Victor Canning
An emotional young nun, convinced that she has betrayed her vows, runs away from her Portuguese convent and wades into the sea to expiate her disgrace by drowning. Unconscious, and at the ultimate moment, she is rescued by an easygoing, unambitious Englishman, Richard Farley. The next day, in a comfortable villa, the late Sister Luiza wakes to a new existence as Sarah Branton.Sarah, an English girl dowered with an antique jewelled girdle of great value through her long-dead and highly unorthodox mother, Lady Jean Branton, finds the idyllic life now opening before her and her lover, Richard Farley, remorselessly threatened by the pitiless servants of State Security in London.Set in Portugal, Gloucestershire and London, Birdcage is a poignant story of love and suspense that magnificently demonstrates Victor Canning’s unrivalled position as a master story-teller.
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Birdcage #6
The Satan Sampler
Victor Canning
On the death of his elder brother, Richard Seyton inherits the Seyton estate, which had been in the family since the fourteenth century. But the great Seyton Hall—showpiece of the estate—has been leased to an international charitable organization, the Felbeck Foundation for the Preservation of the Christian Heritage, which is not all that it seems to be. Determined to find a way to break the lease, Seyton is slowly enmeshed in a dangerous web of intrigue and underground politics, especially when the sinister intelligence organization known as Birdcage intrudes upon his affairs.
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Birdcage #7
Vanishing Point
Victor Canning
For Maurice Crillon, life ambles along in a more or less perfunctory manner. A man of some contradiction, Maurice is an artist of considerable talent and an accomplished restorer of fine paintings. His main occupation in life, however, is making high-quality forgeries of paintings. That and maintaining his various mistresses.When Maurice’s mother dies, he discovers an intriguing and baffling fact about himself: he is not French, as he has always thought, but English, born of aristocratic blood.A visit to his English father, an elderly, delightful eccentric, plunges Crillon into a series of complications reaching through France, Switzerland, and Italy. His curiosity about his parents entangles him in an adventure in which he unwittingly becomes the quarry of the security services of two nations as well as the Mafia, all of them bent on recovering certain incriminating documents that have fallen into his possession.
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