1973 [1972]. 350 pp. This is the novel the movie was based on. First published in 1972, it's considered to be one of the best climbing books ever written. Art professor Jonathan Hemlock lives in a renovated Gothic church on Long Island. He's also a mountain climber and a mercenary, performing assassinations (i.e., sanctions) for money to augment his black-market art collection. Now Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps.
