Description

Saturday Review Press [Published Date: 1975]. Hardcover, 272 pp. Second printing (per number line). In acceptable+ condition with good dust jacket. Black cloth covered boards with silver lettering on spine. Light overall scuffing and soiling to covers. Spine is cracked along rear hinge, but binding is otherwise solid. Pages lightly aged but unmarked. Dust jacket has a few 1/2" or less nicks and tears and creasing along edges. light overall scuffing, aging and soiling to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. A thriller centered around a daring diamond heist from London's Hatton Garden to Antwerp. The story follows Johnny Rhodes, a retired jewel thief lured back for one last spectacular score. Basis for the 1980 film Rough Cut starring Burt Reynolds and David Niven. [From jacket flaps] It is a stone-cold fact that ten times a year an executive jet leaves either Heathrow or Gatwick airport in London bound for Antwerp. Under heavy guard in those ten flights are millions of pounds of rough diamonds being shipped from London's diamond center, Hatton Garden, for cutting and consignment in Antwerp, the center of the world's diamond industry. It is also true that each consignment is valued between £13 and £15 million. Around these true facts Derek Lambert has created his most intriguing novel. At the opening of Touch the Lion's Paw, Johnny Rhodes, a retired and very restless jewel thief, is pondering marriage, vaguely displeased with his spreading waistline. He hears about the shipments from Antwerp and decides to leave retirement for just one last caper - but a heist of such magnitude that it will earn him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Rhodes needs assistance, and he eventually recruits a man named Pierre Tal- lon from Marseilles, now retired but who achieved greatness by organizing some of the great wine frauds of the twentieth century by bottling dregs and labeling them with the classic names of the Bordeaux country. The trio is rounded out by a former (but very classy) cat burglar from Harlem named Moses Ferguson. There is just one flaw in Rhodes's plan. Tallon has been having one hell of a difficult time adjusting to his contact lenses, and Ferguson can't shake a nagging knee injury. As for Rhodes, he still isn't in top shape. Despite these decidedly middle-age afflictions, the trio proceeds with its plans, and the reader is drawn into the fascinating and shadowy world of the diamond trade. Written with expert knowledge and a loupe's magnification for detail, Touch the Lion's Paw is a first-rate entertainment with a verisimilitude that is rare in most novels today.