Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 2, 1992 TAG: 9202020240
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Murder a Secret Service agent in the basement of the White House and there's a potential for scandal. Sabotage the president's foreign relations with the Middle East and there's the potential to lose a re-election campaign.And if that's not enough, suggest that the President is diddy-bopping on the sly with a very attractive CIA agent.
Gerald Petievich is a former Secret Service agent who has turned his past into the basis for a variety of interesting and fast-paced novels, one of which, "To Live and Die In L.A.," became a genuine rarity: a movie that was even better than the book.
Petievich spins a marvelous yarn here - and then lets it all unravel at the end.
Agent Jack Powers is standard-issue burnout, given to women and booze, but nonetheless totally committed to protecting The Man. Powers is drawn into a web of double-dealing that he doesn't much like, but can't seem to avoid, including a liaison with the CIA lass who's the president's mistress.
All this isn't quite as trite as it sounds, and Petievich makes it all believable, even given gaps in geography and police procedures that you'd think a former Secret Service agent would catch.
At the end, however, when Powers has used his skill and knowledge to penetrate the security at Camp David and warn the President of danger, Petievich falters. His story gets a damp fuse and fizzles. The bad guy is unmasked; a Machiavelli without a motive. Why'd he bother, you wonder. Petievich doesn't provide an answer, and the reader can't fine one.
An Agent in Place\ By Robert Littell. Bantam Books. $21.50.
If you think the Soviets have enough troubles at home so that they'll want to leave us alone, think again. That's what Robert Littell would have you do.
The catalyst is Ben Bassett, one of our good guys, who gets sent off to the backstreets of Europe to check on whether the Communist Bear has really gotten as defanged, clawless and senile as some old circus performer. Naturally, there is a proud beauty awaiting him, one who has her own agenda that gives Ben's duty some new and interesting meanings.
Meanwhile, all is going as badly as the plot requires, because deep in the Kremlin's bowels are a bunch of hard-liners worried about where their next war is coming from and determined not to leave it entirely to chance.
"An Agent In Place," is a valiant attempt to maintain the hot line between East and West and turn it into good fiction. But in an age when many on both sides are more concerned about bread lines, Littell just can't bring it off. Another example of the "peace dividend," it seems.
Night Vision\ By Paul Levine. Bantam Books. $20.
In the age of AIDS, consenting adults prefer much of their eroticism at a safe distance. Which gives rise to the Laptop Lotharios, or Lotharioettes, for whom PC stands for Pruient Conversation.
To meet all these needs, there's Compu-Mate, a network of computer groupies who can sign on and get off most any hour of the day or night by using their code words and play names to whisper electronic naughties at one another.
Too bad. Somebody doesn't like it, and the first one to pay is TV Gal, an on-the-make talking head for a Miami station. Said head gets shoved through her screen, and her neck broken along with it.
The hero who sets this straight, along with the subsequent set of murders, is lawyer and ex-pro football second-stringer Jake Lassiter, a part-time poetry quoter and once-a-thespian use uses his skills to right wrongs, catch killers, play games with a female British shrink and get his Latin translated for him by a curmudgeonly medical examiner.
Paul Levine, himself a Miami lawyer, seems to be trying to lay legal claim to the turf recently vacated by the late John D. Macdonald and his irreplaceable Travis McGee. That's an impossible task.
But Lassiter isn't bad in this, his second outing. Levine gives away too much too soon to make his story really compelling, and Lassiter blunders about like a buffoon for more than necessary. Still, Levine captures the seedy stickiness that is Florida politics as well as most anyone writing today, and "Night Vision" brings it all into focus.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.