This early John Wyndham novel is not as accomplished as his 1950s novels, even for genre fiction, but it’s an interesting read in the context of interwar politics. After her divorce Phyllida Shiffer returns to her father’s home in the country, only to find him mysteriously gone without any indication when he left or why. A brilliant scientist who had done work for the War Department in the Great War, Henry Wooldridge and his assistant Straker were working on something, but what? And did their project get them disappeared? The novel quickly becomes a very chatty novel, Wyndham not having learned the fine point of suspense novels yet, and it is a bit of a slog, with so many characters so thinly described that it’s hard to differentiate them sometimes. Why name two characters Drawford and Draymond, one a good guy and one a bad guy? The author does manage to get some very intelligent anti-war arguments woven through the novel, particularly about the role of science in war making, and these still pertain today. But the reader has to wade through a lot to get to them.