Mirage

When police question John Berger about the explosion that destroyed his office building, he recounts a vivid memory of playing in a chess tournament. However, there is no record of any such tournament and John quickly becomes a suspect.

Following his well-received 1999 debut, The Visionary, attorney-cum-novelist Don Passman returns with Mirage, a mind-control, techno-psycho thriller with overtones of Richard Condon's 1959 cold-war masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate--hold the war, hold the masterpiece, but hold that thought.

John Berger is the CEO of a burgeoning cyber-encryption firm. He's seeing an attractive woman, his dog thinks he's god, and he's just passed an enjoyable weekend at an L.A. chess tourney. Only there was no tourney, he's hearing voices, and a bomb hidden in his desk has devastated his office building and two people in it. Plus, his girlfriend's missing. That's Sunday.

On Monday morning, in Orlando, kindly Mr. Simms tools into work and calmly detonates a pipe bomb. In Washington, an alert FBI agent senses a connection between the two explosions and puts it to Carl Davidson, head of the Domestic Terrorism Unit:

"I have a hunch there's something here. At least enough to look over the local's shoulders."

Davidson buttoned his tan raincoat and tied the waist belt in a knot. He turned up the collar, then drilled his eyes into Weldon.

"All right. Don't spend a lot of time. And for God's sake, don't put anyone important on it."

Enter agent Jill Landis, young and widowed, followed by other recognizable characters: Combs, the megalomaniacal director of Mirage, a shot-down, top-secret government mind-control experiment; "Charlie," the Serbian über-terrorist; Berger's comic Jewish mother; an alluringly macho cult specialist, et al. The plot thickens, love blooms in unforeseen places, and a clock is raced to save America from a nightmarish terrorist attack.

If Mirage sounds formulaic, it is. It's also highly readable, humorous, cleverly put together, and largely well-written. A masterpiece it's not; fun to read it is. Passman is, no doubt, a whiz-bang lawyer; if his first two efforts at fiction are any indication, he may become a whiz-bang novelist as well. --Michael Hudson