Head Lock

Washington private investigator Tom Bethany and his girlfriend, married lawyer Hope Edwards, uncover the scandalous life of a television evangelist

Doolittle, who has been a Carter speech writer and once ran a cafe in Vientiane, Laos, ranks with Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain and Ross Thomas as a high-voltage storyteller, and that is exalted company.

Being a conservative person with very strong feelings about adultery and abortion, I had some problems with the plot of Jerome Doolittle's latest Tom Bethany mystery, Head Lock. But there is no denying the appeal of the caper Bethany creates once he sets his sights on a television evangelist with political aspirations who uses religious blackmail to keep his flock in line. Bethany draws a bead on the Rev after the Rev makes serious trouble for Bethany's lover, Hope, and her family and drives a pregnant teen-ager to suicide. Bethany recruits from his circle of strange friends and enlists the aid of a young man who truly cared about the dead girl. What they do to the Rev is imaginative, highly successful and has some truly unsuspected - and blessed - side effects.

At the rate he's going, Tom Bethany, Boston's foremost Spenser imitator, will soon be out of the mystery business altogether. Here, he follows up his S&L bashing in Bear Hug (1992) with a by-the-numbers counterattack on the pro-life zealots who trap his longtime married lover, Hope Edwards, in a D.C. abortion clinic--and terrify Kimberly Butler, a teen too shattered to go through with the abortion she's come for, into suicide after her picture turns up on the evening news. Caring, sensitive Bethany naturally goes after the people who ought to feel guilty but never do: William Pearsall, the drama coach who got Kimberly pregnant, and (mainly) Rev. Howard Orrin, the televangelist whose Life Force ``shock troops'' gave her the shock of her life. Tapping massage-parlor hostess Wanda Vollmer as badger-game bait, Bethany soon has Orrin taking a break from his Senate bid to get tied, beaten, and ridden around Wanda's place--as if you didn't expect that all along. Slick, liberal vigilante pap. Expect a rebuttal from Dan Quayle. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.