Pale Moon Rising

The last of his 11 books about secret agents and their murderous struggles with Nazis both during and after World War II, it was published by Futura in England and by St. Martin's Press in the United States, apparently the same year that O'Brine died.

It is narrated by a nameless hero of Italian birth and more than one nationality, who joins the British undercover services in the early days of the war, impelled primarily by a single-minded, overriding desire to kill Germans.

Grim and totally with humor, the rest of the book is a straightforward narrative of his brutal and merciless attacks against German targets, his eventual capture by the Gestapo in Paris, the ghastly tortures he undergoes at their hands, and his escape from their heavily guarded prison.

He is headed for a small sailboat in which he will try to reach the British sanctuary of Gibraltar—since the book begins many years later with the hero's reflections as he visits the over-grown site of one of his early training camps, we know that he does indeed successfully evade the German forces who have been scouring France for him.

Ah, callow youth—when he was a British saboteur leading French guerrillas in raids on Nazi airfields and gas dumps, fixing enemy anti-aircraft shells so they'd blow up on gunners.