Books: Skuldruggery and High Technology

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(4 of 4)

As the author of that authentic fake, the "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, prolific Writer Clifford Irving can be relied upon for verisimilitude. Here Irving teams with entertaining Novelist Herbert Burkholz (Mulligan's Seed) to write a suavely persuasive, anti-Establishment thriller with the bitter aftertaste of Campari and vodka.

The antiheroes of The Death Freak are old foes and sudden bedfellows: Italian American Eddie Mancuso of the CIA's Technical Services Division and Muscovite Vasily Borgneff, his KGB counterpart. Each is his country's genius of UKDs (Unusual Killing Devices); each, independently, has decided to retire from the killing game. Both are then marked for "extraction" by their agencies (they know too much). To survive, the assassins must knock off the five top section bosses of their respective outfits in Colonial Williamsburg and rustic Zhukovka. The odd couple—Dirty Eddie and cosmopolitan Vasily—get to pool their talents through a seductive Washington connection named Chalice, whom they also share.

So successful is their counteroffensive that when the score reaches 6-0 for Eddie-Vasily, their former employers are also compelled to join forces. Only then do the CIA-KGB apparatchiks realize that the deadly duo have switched roles: Eddie has taken on the Soviets, while Vasily is vacuuming the Washington spooks. Neither elite can predict how, when or against whom the hunted pair will deploy a lethal list of weapons that include camera-fired fléchettes, boomslang venom, plastique-packed tea bags, flame-throwing hair dryers, nerve gas and atomic tennis balls. Nor can they figure who or what is the ubiquitous Chalice, or whether the Mancneff partnership can hold up. As for the Irvholz team, its novel is clever, cynical and compelling.

COCAINE AND BLUE EYES by Fred Zackel; Coward McCann & Geoghegan; 264 pages; $8.95

Drugs and thugs, a missing person and a backchatting investigator also dominate Cocaine and Blue Eyes. Fred Zackel's sprightly first novel, set mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, combines the story of a Pacific Heights dynasty, corporate shenanigans, Chinatown gangs, a spectrum of sex, aging flower children, Mafia money and the houseboat life in Sausalito. The result is as nerve-rattling as a full-throttle auto chase from Grant Avenue to Fisherman's Wharf.

At the outset a sleazy young dope dealer vainly attempts to hire Investigator Michael Brennen to locate blue-eyed Dani, his missing girlfriend and meal ticket. Brennen has just about decided to retire from the shamus game. However, when the dealer shows up mysteriously dead, the down-at-heels p.i. takes on the posthumous assignment. Dani, it develops, belongs to a wealthy Faulknerian family held together by booze, barbiturates, bitterness, incest and greed. Brennen finally finds the girl (also mysteriously dead) and discovers that the family business is being run by a homosexual Chinatown lawyer and his epicene "nephew." The nephew is quietly siphoning off cash to finance a cocaine-smuggling operation, and the tale moves to a bewildering but believable showdown. His publisher reports that Sausalito-based Zackel is working on a second novel, which on the evidence should be as welcome as San Francisco's cracked-crab season.

—Michael Demarest