Mongoose Man

Terrorist Bobby Pearl, an expert in chemical weapons and mass murder, delights in his power to send fear into the hearts of men, and only Jake Hipp, a former member of the CIA's antiterrorist force, Mongoose, stands a chance to find Pearl and stop his path of destruction.

A renegade terrorist with a flair for self-promotion goes on a killing spree in Van Pelt's problematic debut, which starts dramatically enough with an explosion in San Francisco that kills dozens of innocents. The villain is freelance bad guy Bobby Pearl; his chief antagonist, CIA agent Jake Hipp, the "mongoose man" of the title, is charged with tracking down the elusive "snake." After the California bombing, Pearl ups the ante, broadcasting his subsequent attacks via a sleazy talk show hosted by a Geraldo-like figure named Joaquin Hurtado. When the FBI uncovers Pearl's expertise in both chemical and biological weapons, the government panics. So when Hurtado is murdered, the president is suspected: only the mongoose man can keep the commander in chief out of jail. Van Pelt's herky-jerky storytelling and weird expository outbursts (e.g., "The Constitution had been written in the late eighteenth century, the end of the period historians had dubbed 'The Age of Reason'") prevent the narrative from gathering much momentum, and the sophomoric, by-the-numbers plot seems constructed to cash in on as many headline-related incidents as possible. Van Pelt, whose biography calls him a "member of the intelligence community," displays little here in the way of either imagination or expertise to separate this book from a raft of similar titles.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wacky globe-trotting mano a mano series debut of Jake Hipp, former American sociobiology professor turned oddball international antiterrorist agent. When a failure of nerve stops Hipp from killing psychopathic mass-murderer Bobby Pearl at a Tangier tourist-trap caf, he hands a waiter a hundred-dollar bill, asks for the best hashish that money can buy, and proceeds to smoke his way out of despair. After Pearl's bizarre henchmena Scripture-quoting motormouth and a thug who compulsively imitates elephant shrieksengulf a San Francisco ethnic food festival in mustard gas, Pearl, who avoids recognition by wearing fake skin, becomes an international media celebrity, and Esquire prints a characteristically snide article on the CIA's supersecret ``mongoose'' section (mongooses are the natural enemies of snakes, the CIA's code name for terrorists). Hipp, who also owns an expatriate bar on a Filipino island, is fired, but he swears to bring Pearl down. Author van Pelt, himself once a part of the American intelligence community, dramatizes the skewed duel between Hipp and Pearl, both of whom consume copious quantities of marijuana and imported beer as part of a vast Darwinian struggle (in which celebrity, both in the entertainment media and on the Internet, comes to replace the traditional masculine evolutionary rewards of sex and herd domination). That Hipp eventually gets his man is almost trivial: van Pelt's silly, irritating, uproarious saga is an unabashed Pynchon homage, replete with phony pop-song lyrics, weirdly named characters, hyperbolic dialogue, surrealistic interludes, and meandering, pseudo-scientific asides about reptilian brain stems. A treat for Pynchon fans, though perhaps less likely to please those who favor more conventional thrillers. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.