Tango

William Wooding, a bored, overweight Englishman sent to manage a bookshop in South America, finds his life becoming interesting and dangerous when he gets involved with a beautiful prostitute, the country's president, a coup plot, and the CIA

Graham Greene meets Monty Python in this well-crafted, off-the-wall thriller by a pseudonymous author ( Short of Glory ) who once worked for the British Foreign Office. William Wooding, a 35-year-old Brit with an expanding girth, has been transferred by his company to an unnamed South American country to run their bookstore and a paper mill. Once settled in his new environs with his wife, Sally, whom he married just as they were getting bored with each other, Wooding has little more to do than wash his office windows, hyperventilate over Theresa--the soon-to-be mistress of the country's president, with whom Wooding once went to school--and gorge on cheap red wine and red meat. Then Arthur Box, a spy for Special Information Services, recruits Wooding to help save the country from going communist. What follows is pure pandemonium, reminiscent of the Ealings Studios comic movies starring Alec Guinness, until, in a deftly handled transformation, Judd unveils the terrors encountered by those living in a land in search of an identity. The only disappointment in this near-perfect tale is that the villains seem all to be drunkard homosexuals wearing droopy bowties.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This tale of tangled tedium concerns the mundane activities of William Wooding, a suety British bookstore manager posted in an unnamed South American republic. The bookstore, the virtually forgotten outpost of a British conglomerate, is as hopeless and dispirited as Wooding's hapless marriage. While Wooding lusts after a beautiful local prostitute, various intelligence agencies become very interested in him because of his schoolday's acquaintance with the country's president, Carlos Calvaros. As the various characters wend their way toward a complex political coup, their actions are unlikely to sustain the interest of any but the most desperate reader. Not recommended.
- John North, NorCom Enterprises, Toronto
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.