Book Review: The Most Dangerous Game by Gavin Lyall

According to the book, the Most Dangerous Game of all is another man with a gun…

This story is set in northern Finland in the area from Rovaniemi to Ivalo with the denouement on the Russian side of the Finnish border where the strands of the story are tied together.

Bill Cary is a float-plane pilot in northern Finland who smokes a lot, drinks a lot, and gets into many scrapes. He flies customers around the rivers and lakes, as well as conducting geological surveys for mining companies interested in finding nickel reserves in the region.

There are three background threads in the book – someone is exporting fake sovereigns to Russia from somewhere in northern Scandinavia, there’s a mystical treasure in the area called the Volkof Treasure that people have been seeking for decades, and a British Secret Service agent is in the area who reveals Cary worked for his service fifteen years previously during World War II.

The other two float planes in the area both crash in mysterious circumstances. Many of Cary’s friends and acquaintances are either killed or injured during the story. An attractive lady, the sister of one of the hunters Cary has taken into the Finnish forest, arrives on the scene and wants to meet her brother, but the hunter is no longer there when they head to the cabin where he’s staying. The police suspect Cary is responsible for one or more of the deaths in the area and question him, though he escapes their clutches after assaulting them.

The secret service agent catches up with Cary and ‘persuades’ him to fly over the border where he should rescue an agent who has some cargo that needs to be removed from Russia.