City Of Light

Working for a small organization monitoring international human rights violations, Thomas Zane is plunged into a nightmarish labyrinth of African politics, betrayal, torture, and death, when he investigates the mysterious killing of his best friend

Thomas Zane, the driven, deracinated, cynical hero of this intelligent, intricate thriller, is an American in Paris, where he unravels coded computer messages for an agency that clandestinely monitors civil wars, terrorism and human rights abuses worldwide. Haunted by thoughts of his mother, a jailed '60s radical, Zane desperately seeks three men: a Nigerian poet turned fanatic revolutionary, an English colleague who has disappeared in Africa, and a Swedish doctor who assists mercenaries in "humane" forms of torture. Zane has slept with the Nigerian militant's estranged South African wife, whom the missing English operative also loves. The action shifts from a Parisian jazz club to Nigeria and then to Mali, where the main characters face off in a sensational climax amid evil spirits, lepers and flies that spread blindness-inducing parasites. Reeling off telegraphic prose, Doane ( The Surprise of Burning ) develops his characters with great care, including Fingers, an aged black American pianist, and sultry barmaid Marie. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Light and darkness--actual and metaphorical--form patterns and links in this complex novel of self-discovery. Thomas Zane works in the half-light of the computer screen for ABRI (a small Parisian organization) gathering vital information for other neutral groups and the press on massacres and political imprisonments around the world. In Zane's territory (Africa), informant and friend Harry Street is determined to find and stop the man who has been using a devastating torture toxin in Third World countries for decades. When a coded message signals that Street has been killed, Zane exchanges daylight for the cover of night and authorized passwords for hacking to learn what has really happened. This multilayered thriller of truth-seekers trying to save humanity and of disinformation and murder is involving and highly readable.
- V. Louise Saylor, Eastern Washington Univ. Lib., Cheney
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.