Capitol Punishment

A nuclear holocaust threatens as a U.S.-backed Cuban fighting force tries to topple Castro, who threatens to bomb the States with a nuclear weapon no one knew he had, even as Russia reacts to the aggression against the Cubans.

This would-be techno-thriller initially appears to have the requisite action ingredients. While the Russians and Americans are at a delicate point in disarmament talks, a U.S. submarine vanishes. In Cuba, as an anti-Castro revolt nears success, Castro launches an atomic warhead hidden for 30 years. Then an FBI agent is gunned down in L.A. by Cuban hit men out to silence a defector. But almost immediately, Pearson's ( Cloudburst ) sprawling, overcrowded novel becomes mired in its own excesses. Events escalate at a barely manageable rate, as informers are chased, a boozing journalist survives one narrow escape after another, and the LA police try to solve domestic crimes with international overtones. In addition to an overwhelming number of poorly defined characters and turgid prose, the novel suffers from Pearson's incomplete mastery of present and past events as he mingles history with speculation. Some readers may also be short-circuited by all the techno-babble. Still, this partial misfire provides ample fodder for conspiracy buffs and military historians to chew on.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An ideological thriller in which Pearson (Cloudburst, 1993) presents Cuba--in reality a tiny, dirt-poor nation stripped of financial aid from its former Soviet lifeline--as a raging Cold War power whose fanatic leader is intent on punishing Moscow for having betrayed his 1959 revolution. It seems that Fidel still has a Soviet-supplied nuclear warhead stored in a plutonium pit. He also has a rebellion fomenting against him, led (per usual) by Cuban exiles returning to their homeland with CIA training. ``Things changed, societies matured, and people who were once cattle in a pen had come to see the benevolent rancher as little more than a guide to the slaughter house,'' muses an anti-Castro counterrevolutionary. Pearson's 39- year-old American president is a gung-ho hawk plotting to even the score 30 years after the US was humiliated by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. ``Why not blow the planes up completely?'' he asks top aides in the White House. ``Wouldn't you get a bigger bang by tossing a bunch of explosives in the air intake?'' Technological jargon both strengthens and slows down this often tedious tale of high-level espionage counterbalanced by street crime deriving from the machinations of devil commies 90 miles from Miami. Occasionally, Pearson adds touches of humanity to a sprawling cast of largely wooden characters. These include alcoholic Los Angeles reporter George Sullivan, who witnesses the assassinations of both a Cuban canary and a G-man, then becomes a target himself. He's rescued by virtuous federal agents, including a female sharpshooter named Frankie. Meanwhile, Castro, known outside fiction as a shrewd fellow for having survived this long, comes off as a baroque cartoon. ``We will defeat this coup d'etat,'' he says. ``The perpetrators will be captured and hanged in the plaza!'' As in war, truth becomes the first casualty of propaganda. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Pearson (Cloudburst, Morrow, 1993) delivers another riveting technothriller, using many of the same characters that appeared in his debut novel. A complex web of plots include a plan by Cuban rebel forces and the CIA to overthrow Castro in a modern Bay of Pigs (hence the title); a sensitive and vulnerable cooperative effort between the United States and Russia to modernize Russia's defense systems; and Castro's plans to launch a secretly held nuclear missile. Two FBI special agents become involved when a Cuban defector tries to warn the United States about the weapon. When the U.S. government finally finds out about the weapon, it prepares against a nuclear attack and warn Russia. The Russians are justifiably skeptical; while trying to convince them that the threat is indeed from Cuba, the CIA sends its Delta force to Cuba to secure and defuse the bomb. Actions and heroics build as the "good guys" win the day and Cuba gains a new leader. Highly recommended.
Stacie Browne Chandler, Plymouth P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.