Thrillers

By JEAN HELLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

HOT SPRINGS, by Stephen Hunter, Simon & Schuster, $25.

After crafting a brilliant trilogy that began with Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter's Time to Hunt failed to impress. But he is back with a period story in Hot Springs, and this one is nifty.

Earl Swagger, who will become the father of Bobby Lee Swagger, protagonist in several of Hunter's previous books, returns from World War II as an often-wounded winner of the Medal of Honor. But he is lost. He is prepared for nothing in civilian life, and his wounds preclude him from staying in the military.

Alcoholic and suicidal, he can't believe it when he is recruited by legendary and aging FBI agent D.A. Parker to recruit and train a force of fighters to help clean up Hot Springs, Ark., which really was a center of gambling, prostitution and a host of other vices in the 1940s. Warring mob bosses from New York and Chicago could vacation together in Hot Springs in peace. They left their differences at home.

Earl Swagger's Hot Springs is dominated by New York mob boss Owney Maddox. As he and his Jayhawkers raid casinos and brothels, Earl is beset by worries about his wife's troublesome pregnancy and haunted by memories of the war and his childhood as defined by an abusive father. Meanwhile, he has no idea that he is being betrayed by elements within and without his unit.

Hot Springs' settings are exquisitely authentic, the story brilliantly crafted and dotted with real celebrities. The book simply works.

THE ASSISTANT, by J. Patrick Law, Simon & Schuster, $25.

The Assistant is not the perfect first novel by any stretch of the imagination, but it bodes well for author J. Patrick Law, who handles a complex story with a dexterity some more seasoned authors don't always demonstrate. Ben Poltarek is an American Jew, an innocent who has no idea his parents have been secret agents for the Israeli government for 40 years. On the night of their deaths in a hit-and-run accident, a badly wounded man arrives at Ben's house and delivers a message meant for Ben's father. Then he dies.

Suddenly, Ben is thrust into a mortal struggle in the Middle East that pits a top Israeli intelligence official determined to bring security to his country against a fanatical Palestinian sworn to carve a homeland out of Israeli territory. His ambitious plan eventually involves the son of the president of the United States and the widow of an assassinated Palestinian diplomat.

I wish Law had spent fewer pages weaving the complex backdrop for this story and more time developing his characters so I had more reason to pull for one side against the other. But in The Assistant, Law has constructed an exciting and clever story with plenty of action.

EASY PREY, by John Sanford, Putnam, $25.95.

It is axiomatic in the world of mysteries and thrillers that you don't reveal at the end of a book that the butler did it when there has never been a butler in the story. Someone please tell that to John Sanford, author of the enormously successful Prey series. The sin Sanford commits in his latest, Easy Prey, is bad, but it isn't the only thing wrong with the book. The effort simply has no oomph.

Deputy Police Chief Lucas Davenport is drawn into a double murder at a very upscale party. One of the dead is Alie'e Maison, a super model; the other doesn't seem to be much of anybody except an inveterate partygoer. Aside from the fact that my eyes and my mind stumbled over that name, Alie'e, every time it appeared, Davenport finds himself stumbling even more often over suspects: the model's fundamentalist brother, her boyfriend, her girlfriend, a hotel manager, a banker, a real estate tycoon.

The hunt gives Davenport endless opportunities to show up the Minnesota Highway Patrol in his super Porsche, but it gives him way too little in the personal relationships field. He dabbles with three women, and if it is unsatisfying for him, imagine how it is for the reader.

There is nothing about Easy Prey to recommend it. The story is slow to get going and never really sizzles. The characters have become cardboard cutouts. And a yarn that could have been okay is destroyed by the out-of-the-blue ending. I loved the early Lucas Davenport novels. Now they read as if Sanford is just mailing them in.

Jean Heller is the author of the mystery-thrillers, Handyman and Maximum Impact.

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