Five years after its publication, this reviewer still has affection for Helen MacInnes' first novel, "Above Suspicion."… Miss MacInnes has published three novels since that event—and, in every instance, slickness has replaced real drama, and technical competence has atoned for warmth. Their author is by now a dependable performer, in The Saturday Evening Post sense of that dubious phrase….

"Horizon" is Miss MacInnes' current contribution to the still fashionable—and still perfunctory—probing of the POW's psyche, before and after his escape from the barbed wire. Peter Lennox, her hero, is one of the most taciturn Englishmen we have ever encountered in a novel. To make matters worse, virtually nothing happens to him after his carefully muted escape from an Italian prison camp in '43, and his flight to the mountains of the South Tyrol….

The author has prepared her scenery with loving care, but it is...