[Susan Foreman]

It's not what you think!

First published in 1954, a full nine years before Terry Nation gave the Daleks a home planet

From the dust jacket:
"Jess Matthews, a fully accredited American foreign correspondent, had come into the People’s Free Federal Republic in comfort on the Orient Express. But events had moved too swiftly in the Balkans and now he was trying to escape from that terrorized country by masquerading as a peasant driving a herd of goats.
He had come in alone. Going out -- if he was ever to get out -- he had company: Cora Lambert, a high-voltage American newspaper woman, who was equally in trouble. For Jess and Cora had learned a secret that could destroy Bulic, head of the dreaded Security Police, and to Bulic it was a choice of his life or theirs.
Jess had decided their only chance of survival was to head for the frontier at the border town of Skaro -- with the Security Police hot on their heels. Adventure piled on adventure, escape on hair-breadth escape. Mile by mile the two correspondents made their way toward the hoped-for lights of freedom, hiding in gutted farmhouses, riding in a Model T truck full of singing girls and, finally, creeping into the darkened graveyard above the brightly lit frontier river -- just short of safety."