In Helen MacInnes's novels—"Cloak of Darkness" is her 20th—every cafe and konditorei in Europe is a launching pad for terrorist activity, funded, encouraged and often directly organized by that source of all global evil, the K.G.B. The hand that brushes the Sacher torte crumbs off a lapel may shortly be carrying a Russian grenade. For many years Miss MacInnes has been the Claire Sterling of fiction; not even détente thawed her cold-war message. In "Prelude to Terror" (1978), the heroine, a Western agent, summed up the prevailing attitude: "There's a job to be done, a necessary job. Someone has to do it; we can't all sit back and watch the totalitarians take over." She goes on, "I know it has to be done. Or else we'll all end up regimented nonentities, scared to death to step out of line or raise our voices. Everything and everyone in place according to the book of Marx." (p. 15)

Actually, the characters in all of Miss MacInnes's books, especially the last three decades' worth, are interchangeably innocuous. Good guys are good, bad guys bad, with descriptive seasonings omitted. If writing were a salad bar, Helen MacInnes would be iceberg lettuce, bland but serviceable. (pp. 15, 33)

While [espionage writers such as John le Carré] dwelt on the modern spy's ambivalences, emotional paralyses and other assorted neuroses, Miss MacInnes, her formula pretty much intact, continued to see the enemy with single-minded revulsion.

But it's not her refusal to go "modern" and "psychological" that's wrong…. The problem is rather her lack of verve, the way in which her books are as chill as the war she's depicting. It's enough to make one long for temperature-raising doses of sex and sadism, although the readers who have made Miss MacInnes a best-selling writer would no doubt disagree. A cross between Ayn Rand and Phyllis Whitney, without the redeeming excesses of either, Miss MacInnes has built an oeuvre of strangely funless thrillers.

"Cloak of Darkness" is no exception….

On the one hand, it's hard to fault Miss MacInnes for portraying a normal-seeming guy with the good manners to call his wife so she won't wait dinner. But the effect of these details is to let in an odor of bygone days—not wholly gone, but not retrievable either, even during a period of sociopolitical recidivism. For Miss MacInnes, the C.I.A. and related bodies will always be on the side of the angels, and the dress code in heaven specifies button-down collars….

Murder and mayhem occur, but no really likable character meets his maker, which has not always been the case in Miss MacInnes's previous books. The end, which arrives long after one is ready for it, is tidy and aseptically romantic; more MacInnes novels than not are sealed with a kiss after the Iron Curtain has once again closed on its own.

Intelligence work probably is dull and conventional. One should be grateful that Miss MacInnes's characters don't keep office hours and play golf on the weekends—on the reader's time, so to speak. "Cloak of Darkness" is not a dreadful thriller; it simply doesn't thrill. And the suspense, where it exists, is inserted like toothpicks in a club sandwich; it could be extracted entire, leaving the plot unchanged. (p. 33)