[In the following review, the critic praises My Brother Michael as an improbable but well-written and fully absorbing mystery.]

[My Brother Michael is a] fast moving suspense novel set against the background of Delphi, which affords the reader even more hair-raising nightmarish adventures than in earlier novels. Mary Stewart has hit upon a successful basic pattern:—a young Englishwoman, escaping herself in travel, becomes involved in a succession of tense experiences, skirting death, and playing with dangerous characters who stop at nothing. This time the sense of inevitable disaster colors every incident:—her first rather hair-brained acceptance of the challenge of delivering a car, ordered by an unknown woman for an unknown man in Delphi, where she wants to go; her facile meeting with the Simon to whom the car was assigned—only he knew nothing about it—and his involving her in his own mission, to run down the truth of his brother Michael's violent death some fourteen years earlier, when he was in the Greek underground. Just how the mystery is solved—what the explanation of a curious letter received after Michael's death—and how Cemilla finds herself a pawn in a dangerous game build up to an incredible but absorbing climax of passion and death. The Delphi setting is unique, and the story takes on the echoes of the classic tragedies centuries ago. Mary Stewart writes vividly, she conveys an extraordinary sense of place, she tells a first rate story.