Styron's provocative anti-war novel: The story of two marine reservists' rejection of the forced conformity of the military machine. In the shadow of the Korean War, a series of misfired mortar shells kill six men in a marine camp during a training exercise, prompting the commanding officer to order a grueling punishment: a thirty-six mile march through the suffocating heat of the Carolina summer. Intended to beat discipline into the aging reservists,...

'If a man is likely to be murdered you can't just stand by and do nothing. Or can you?' Inglewood Turrets, an expensive anachronism in the leafy outskirts of North London is a cross between St Pancreas Station and Holloway Gaol, and the house where the formidable Miss Charlotte Cambric recreates Victorian elegance for foreign culture-vultures. Vassily Kopeck, the half-Russian, half-Polish physicist and an 'attaché of sorts', disappears as effectively...