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EXCELSIOR by Paul Hyde Bonner

EXCELSIOR

By

Publisher: Scribner

Selection by the Literary Guild for July assures an even wider audience. Report repeated from page 100 of the February 1st bulletin, as follows: ""A third cosmetic, cosmopolitan entertainment has been fashioned to attract the audience of S.P.Q.R. and Hotel Talleyrand -- and Zurich, this time- does not sober the upper echelon activities of a continental capital. Robert Eggli, a Swiss banker of powerful acumen, is still, at 80, active in all phases and a weathervane of international affairs. At home, he governs his family with autocratic absolutism- and on the side he maintains his long love affair with a widowed Baronne. Walter, his eldest son, lacks his brilliance; Helene, Walter's wife, is engaged in a love affair with a bounder believed in contact with a Nazi spy; Jacques, his second son, is married to an American and joins the OSS after Pearl Harbor, while his son, Robert, enlists to fly. Jacques is used to spy not only on Helene's lover, but also on his father's code books which will reveal the shifting fortunes of the war. And with Robert's death, he is willing to violate the neutrality of his country of adoption- while it is only his father's death which intercepts him in time... Not quite the firm narrative of the earlier books, there is still the aura of fashionable glamor which makes this a kind of costume jewelry- for strong rentals and sales.