House of the Hunted - Mark Mills

House of the Hunted is about a man being sucked back into a life and past he had worked hard to escape. Tom Nash at one time worked in British intelligence, but is five years into a more relaxing career as a writer on the French Mediterranean. He's also preparing for an annual two-week stretch of partying with an international collection of friends and acquaintances.

Sadly, all that fun is spoiled by the Italian assassin who sneaks into Tom's home and tries to drug him into a heart attack. Tom isn't clear why someone from Italy would be out to kill him, but as he and his friend Leonard (still working in the Foreign Office) investigate, Tom becomes convinced this has something to do with a mission in Russia in 1919, sixteen years earlier. That Leonard dismisses it makes Tom all the more paranoid.

House of the Hunted is a bit more focused on the problem at hand than The Information Officer was, which I appreciate. I think the idea of someone's work wearing them down, prompting the need for a change is appealing. So is the idea that the past can easily come back to cause problems. There's a bit of a discordant note with all the dinners, sailing, and scavenger hunts, because I was reasonably sure Tom was safe during those scenes. Frankly, he's fairly sure of the same thing, but it doesn't reduce his tension, because he spends much of the time distracted, watching for threats, trying to determine who is working against him.

Mills writes a lot of interesting, variable characters to surround Tom with, which helps make the party scenes more interesting. There's a lot of witty back and forth, and some pointed discussion about the deteriorating state of the world in the mid-1930s. I did find the relationship between Tom and Lucy (Leonard's daughter) a bit dodgy. She's a college kid by this point, but he's known her since she was four, which I find unsettling. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.