The Wrecking Crew

Blurb

The Wrecking Crew is a spy novel by Donald Hamilton first published in 1960. It was the second novel featuring Hamilton's ongoing protagonist, counter-agent and assassin Matt Helm. In this book Hamilton continued the hard-headed and gritty realism he had built up around Helm in the first novel of the series, Death of a Citizen. In contrast to most of the tough, but apparently bone-headed, action heroes who had preceded him for the previous 40 years of fiction, Helm was shown to be a tough — and, most important, a tough-minded — agent who actually thought ahead: a man who would let himself be ignominiously beaten up by the opposition to establish his credentials as an ineffective and unworrisome operative, if that was what his role called for, in order to achieve his ultimate goals. In this book, and in the others in the series, when Helm walks into an ambush and is hit on the head, it is because he wants to be ambushed, not because he is too stupid to anticipate the ambush.
In this book, Helm, code name Eric, has been recently reactivated as an operative for a secret American government organization after 15 years as a sedentary photographer and family man in Santa Fe, New Mexico.