Cheney writes in a noir hardboiled style despite being a British writer. Most of his stories that I have read are about tough British types, but this one is about an American gunman for a Chicago mob in the 1930s (working for fictionalized equivalents of Capone and his rivals), who had later joined British Intelligence in World War 2 in operations in Norway, is betrayed to the Germans, suffers horrors in a German prison camp but manages to kill the commandant just before being rescued by the British. The story actually opens with that killing, and tells the background in flashbacks while the hero (Berg) is going around settling scores with the Chicago mob who are oddly enough now in Britain. Despite his doing some fairly grim deeds, he ends up with a surprisingly gentle eucatastrophe arranged by his British intelligence handler. ( )