This image is the cover for the book Lonely Skier

Lonely Skier

High among the Dolomite Mountains, a film crew led by a madman will risk their lives for Nazi gold, in this death-defying thriller.

Out of work, out of money, and out of time, Neil Blair is wandering through Piccadilly Circus when he stumbles upon the chance of a lifetime. He meets an old army buddy, a half–con man half-genius film producer, who offers him a job. Suddenly, Blair is off to the Dolomites for three months to work on the script for a film that will be unlike anything the cinema has ever seen: a thriller entirely based in truth, every word steeped in blood.

Ostensibly, the film is to be a skiing picture, but Blair soon learns there’s much more at stake than a bit of sport. Beneath the mountain ice is a fortune in Nazi gold, which the producer will find—or die trying. Blair’s task is to document that hunt on the page, but he’s about to be trapped in a battle of wits that could destroy him before he types a single word.

Shot through with the atmospheric tension that was Hammond Innes’s trademark, The Lonely Skier is a terrifying story of murder and deception at the edge of the world.

Hammond Innes

Hammond Innes (1913–1998) was the British author of over thirty novels, as well as children’s and travel books. Born Ralph Hammond Innes in Horsham, Sussex, he was educated at the Cranbrook School in Kent. He left in 1931 to work as a journalist at the Financial News. The Doppelganger, his first novel, was published in 1937. Innes served in the Royal Artillery in World War II, eventually rising to the rank of major. A number of his books were published during the war, including Wreckers Must Breathe (1940), The Trojan Horse (1940), and Attack Alarm (1941), which was based on his experiences as an anti-aircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain.

Following his demobilization in 1946, Innes worked full-time as a writer, achieving a number of early successes. His novels are notable for their fine attention to accurate detail in descriptions of place, such as Air Bridge (1951), which is set at RAF stations during the Berlin Airlift. Innes’s protagonists were often not heroes in the typical sense, but ordinary men suddenly thrust into extreme situations by circumstance. Often, this involved being placed in a hostile environment—for example, the Arctic, the open sea, deserts—or unwittingly becoming involved in a larger conflict or conspiracy. Innes’s protagonists are forced to rely on their own wits rather than the weapons and gadgetry commonly used by thriller writers. An experienced yachtsman, his great love and understanding of the sea was reflected in many of his novels.

Innes went on to produce books on a regular schedule of six months for travel and research followed by six months of writing. He continued to write until just before his death, his final novel being Delta Connection (1996). At his death, he left the bulk of his estate to the Association of Sea Training Organisations to enable others to experience sailing in the element he loved.

Open Road Integrated Media