Books: Unheroes

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Three thrillers

Despite the return of 007 in Moonraker, the stars of the thriller genre are no longer superheroes. Nor are they the antiheroes of Graham Greene and John le Carré. The new breed are unheroes: stumblers into international espionage, bumblers onto lethal plots. The following thrillers feature this summer's best bunglers:

Death of a Patriot by R.E. Harrington (Putnam; 240 pages; $8.95). Thomas Hobbes, son of a crack CIA agent, has also joined the Langley leviathan, but as a lowly and embittered file clerk. Young Hobbes is too timid and colorless for cloak-and-swagger business: even his boss of almost two years can't remember his name. But then the "superspooks" notice his striking resemblance to George Gordon, a dashing double agent who was just about to deliver some (falsified) secrets to the Soviets when he was killed. Why not send Hobbes to the rendezvous instead? "We'll program his every move," promises the CIA psychiatrist.

Naturally, things get out of hand in a tale that is as duplicitous as Hobbes' CIA tutors. In requisite Le Carré manner, it is hard to tell good guys from bad, though Hobbes proves both likable and levelheaded. Sharply written with a surprise twist at the end, Harrington's third thriller turns into a deadly round of final payments.

Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell (Doubleday; 246 pages; $8.95). One of those well-schooled British suspense novels that mix metaphors with murders, Make Death Love Me is set in the sleepy

Suffolk town of Childon. Nothing exciting has happened there for centuries: much to the despair of Alan Groombridge, the bland bank manager, who "had come late in life to the heady intoxication of literature and it had poisoned him for what he had." What he has are two spoiled kids, a wife who dresses like a Kewpie doll, housing estate neighbors "as dull as he"—and no way out.

Ironically, two young and very incompetent robbers are the making of his fortune. As Groombridge listens from a closet, they hold up his bank, fleeing with £ 4,000 and Joyce, the lone teller, as hostage. Groombridge, given the perfect alibi, also goes on the lam: with the £ 3,000 that he was fondling in the closet. But the past is not so neatly buried. What began as a quiet thriller turns into a bloody chiller as the robbers (one sick, the other insane) try to elude the police—and Groombridge, who turns into a conscience-stricken sleuth. Rendell's 18th novel is a capital crime and punishment affair.

Flyaway by Desmond Bagley (Doubleday; 300 pages; $9.95). "He's so insignificant he hardly exists," says one character in Flyaway about Paul Billson, the dull, rabbity clerk whose disappearance trig gers Bagley's latest case. Billson, it seems, has blundered off to the Sahara to vindicate his long-lost father, a pilot in a London-to-Cape Town race who may or may not have crashed his plane as part of an in surance swindle. Max Stafford, head of a nourishing industrial-security firm, goes after him, partly as a lark and partly be cause "it wasn't often that the top brass of Stafford Security appeared in the front line, more's the pity."