The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins (Harry Patterson)

THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE (1971) is one of the many high adventure novels Jack Higgins wrote before becoming an international bestseller with THE EAGLE HAS LANDED in 1975. Many Higgins fans regard these earlier novels as his best work, and I can’t say as I disagree with them.

THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE is set in Brazil in 1938 and is narrated by Neil Mallory, a down-on-his-luck British pilot who, through a series of misadventures, winds up working for an American flier named Sam Hannah, who was a flying ace in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I. Hannah was even known as the Black Baron, the Allies’ answer to the Red Baron. But now he’s come down in the world considerably and has a contract to fly mail and supplies to various isolated settlements in the Amazon jungle.

Things take a turn for the worse when a mission hospital is attacked by natives and the priest and nuns who work there are slaughtered, except for two nuns who are missing when the atrocity is discovered. The sister of one of those nuns, who is a beautiful nightclub singer and aspiring movie star, shows up along with another nun, and Mallory and Hannah are drawn into their efforts to locate the missing women or at least find out what happened to them. Not surprisingly, this does not go well.

As usual, Higgins (whose real name was Harry Patterson) does a great job with the setting, vividly portraying the beauties and the dangers—mostly the dangers—of the Amazon rainforest. His characters are well-developed, none of them completely sympathetic or truly evil. The romantic triangle that develops between Mallory, Hannah, and the young American woman is believable and handled in a realistic fashion. And of course, there’s plenty of action, both in the jungle and in the skies above it. The problem in this book, if there is one, is that the plot is fairly thin and sort of meanders along without any real twists. The one late development that takes Mallory by surprise has been pretty obvious to the reader all along.

But that wasn’t enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. The last section is very suspenseful and then it all comes to a fitting conclusion. I had a good time reading THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE, but I’ve read enough by Jack Higgins in the past that I wasn't surprised by that. I’m sure I’ll be reading more by him in the future, especially more of those early novels before he was a household name. This one is still in print from Amazon in both e-book and paperback editions.