'Captain Anson MacLeod, United States Army Aviator during the World War, and now a well known Engineer in Aeronautics, is on a year's much needed vacation in Europe. He is having tea in the garden of an exclusive club in Paris, and becomes interested in a beautiful young lady at the next table, with surprising results. From then on the intricate mystery story of the "Winged Avenger" begins, taking the reader on a yacht to four little islands in the Pacific Ocean, and not until the closing chapter is the mystery unravelled' (1935 Green Press edition). The narrative is also played out in Australia at one stage.
In
Notes on Australian Science Fiction Graham Stone writes:
This is in the tradition of plots and counterplots involving radical new weapons. In this case a remote controlled unmanned torpedo-carrying aircraft, a guided missile as it would later be called. But on the first page we have the means of neutralising it along with other engines of war: 'a new invention of a radio beam of light... so powerful that it would stop all machinery in motion, areoplanes, motor cars, warships, submarines. All would be made powerless by this radio wave, and wars would be fought with machines guided and controlled by mechanical robots instead of human beings (pp.139-140).
