There are two thriller writers whose work never fails to give me pleasure no matter how many times I reread their books. One is Alistair MacLean; the other is Jack Higgins. Not long ago I was in the library looking over their shelf of sale books, and I saw a three-in-one volume of Higgins' work. The books included in it are The Last Place God Made, The Savage Day, and Toll for the Brave. I have all three of them in their first U.S. paperback editions, but how could I pass this up for a buck? The answer: I couldn't.The Last Place God Made is set in Brazil in the late 1930s. Neil Mallory is a bush pilot who's finally put together enough money to get back to England. Unfortunately for him, it's stolen by a prostitute and Mallory has to accept a job from Sam Hannah, another pilot, who has a contract to deliver mail and perform other services for the government. Hannah was an Ace in WWI, and he's the best pilot Mallory's ever seen. It's quite lucky for him that Mallory came along because he desperately needs another pilot to help him. Without help, he'd lose his contract.
What ensues is high adventure in the vein of a western novel, with the indigenous people this time being Brazilian. They've attacked a church, killing a number of nuns, two of whom are unaccounted for. Another nun, along with the beautiful sister of one of the missing women, shows up, and Mallory and Hannah are drafted to go to the church and try to find the women.
There's a lot of flying, plenty of fighting of all kinds (though I don't recall either Mallory or Hannah using a bow as depicted on the cover of the first Fawcett paperback). More than once in his novels, Higgins uses a younger man and an older, slightly corrupt, one paired together in a dangerous enterprise. It seldom works out well.
If you like good writing and just plain entertaining fiction, you can't go wrong with Higgins, and that certainly holds true for The Last Place God Made.
