The End of the Web

Silly melodrama wrecks the superior set-up of this reissue—Sims’s second Ed Buchanan novel, first published in 1976—in the British Library Classic Thrillers series. After lecherous middle-aged London antiques dealer Leo Selver dies in what looks like a tawdry sex scandal, his widow asks family friend Buchanan, a former policeman and boxer, to clear the dead man’s name. Unfortunately, Buchanan immediately attracts the malevolent attention of the vicious masked fiend responsible for Selver’s demise—and for the deaths of several other people pursuing a blackmail-handy list of the would-be traitors who were willing to betray Britain to the Nazis during WWII. Fortunately, when it comes to carrying out his nefarious schemes, the masked man behaves like a blithering idiot. And so it goes—until the story ends in a frenzy of wild activity and unresolved plot lines. To his credit, though, Sims (1923–1999) handles the initial characterization and setting well. (Nov.)