A Call to Arms

Horse-racing heir Kit Massiter is expelled from his family home in Bellary Bay, Ireland, after he embarrasses his ruthless father, Angus Massiter, at an equestrian event just before the outbreak of WW II. A former RAF pilot, Clare de Vaux, gets a hunch that the young Kit has some connection to an older friend of his, Stephen Raymond (now a hunting guide in Kenya) and, taking a proprietary interest in Kit's sudden homelessless, encourages him to join the Air Force. The reader suspects all along that de Vaux's hunter friend will turn out to be Kit's real father and his mother's true love, but the father-son reunion eventually achieved here is satisfying nonetheless. Welcome's seventh novel, a sequel to Bellary Bay, offers us a panorama of horse-racing, safari-hunting and plane-flying, but the author's real gift is in giving us people and characterizations much more interesting than the events and activities that surround them. December 30