Due Reckoning

DUE RECKONING--Stephen McKenna --Little, Brown ($2.50). This is the last volume in the series of three called The Realists. The central figures in the series are again three: Ambrose Sheridan, titan and punching politician, who marries Auriol Otway who loves Max Hendry. In Due Reckoning, the Gordian knot of this situation is not sliced but neatly untied by Author McKenna. That he had the untying in mind when he first pulled the strings tight is sufficiently obvious; and Auriol's prayers for the one chance in a hundred that will release her from a marriage that was never more than a duty gladly borne are quite apparently going to be answered by Author McKenna who is their instigator.

Britishers delight in reading about such supermen as Ambrose Sheridan; supermen who rise to journalistic and then political eminence, who marry beautiful and frail aristocrats, who carry a bee in their derby bonnets about resuscitating the human race or the working classes of England. Author McKenna writes about his superman less pompously than did H. G. Wells, less seriously than did John Galsworthy, less romantically than did Michael Arlen, more rapidly than did W. L. George. Youthful and prolific, Author McKenna knows his subject at first hand; through the War and until two years after Sonia, in 1917, brought him bows and plaudits, he served the British government in diplomatic or other capacities.