The author of "Day of the Triffids", but no aliens here. In form and basic setup it's a well-crafted comfy British mystery: plucky girl returns from India to find that her brilliant eccentric scientist father has disappeared, she appeals to her two somewhat ne'er do well witty young male friends who have a housemaid named Mrs. Roberts, eventually Constable Pennywise is involved, and ultimately the sharp-minded Inspector Jordan of Scotland Yard, we have a side-plot about which of the young men if any may be in love with the girl, and so on. Quite nice!

But also we get some rather weighty addresses from more than one of the characters about how there are bad trends in the world and people are just hiding their heads in the sand, about how war is bad and (private, capitalist) weapons makers are very bad, and ultimately the message of the book is that sometimes a desperate character has to take things into their own hands, and do illegal and even violent things.

Which is rather outside of what we expect from the genre. But (or therefore) it works, and works well. A fast, but memorable and worthwhile, read.