Innes, Hammond Atlantic Fury.

An exciting, if improbable, sea-going yarn set primarily in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides chain of islands, with much action on a thoroughly isolated, now uninhabited island patterned after St. Kilda Island (located 41 miles west of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides). Though Innes’ story takes place in the early 1960s much of its plot is devoted to the solution of a World War 2 mystery about what really happened in 1944 to a group of survivors off a torpedoed Canadian troopship. Though the vessel had been sunk south in the Irish Sea, at least one survivor evidently survived a month long ordeal drifting slowly northward towards the Outer Hebrides aboard a life raft. A case of assumed identity complicates the story. Innes is perhaps at his best writing about the meteorology involved in predicting (and effectively dealing with) a hurricane force storm which assails the islands early on; indeed, his superb powers of description rival those employed by George R. Stewart in the latter’s classic novel, Storm (1941).