Maximum Vigilance

As the President's personal psychiatrist, Dr. Desaix Clark must decide whether or not the Chief Executive is mentally competent to manage an imminent international crisis that could precipitate World War III

Loading a catastrophe into every chapter and "using psychosexual constructs to explain world events," Pieczenik ( Blood Heat ) draws on his State Department crisis management experience to fuel this provocative political thriller. Dr. Desaix Clark, psychiatrist and crisis consultant for the White House, returns home from a negotiating session in Japan to find Washington poised for nuclear war, locked in the worst crisis since presidents Westview and Zotov succeeded Bush and Yeltsin. Westview warns of a coup against his presidency, while the Secretary of State insists that Westview himself is behind the plot and begs Clark to declare him insane. Meanwhile, Zotov is abducted in a Russian coup that seems connected to the U.S. crisis by a mysterious "Project Baltimore." As top cabinet personnel are assassinated, Clark and Mary Dougherty, Westview's security chief, team up to crack the mystery. Only intermittently suspenseful, the narrative would have been more successful if the protagonists had less ego and libido and more integrity. Much of the confused action is espionage cliche, but readers may remain focused, since the question of who the bad guys are is adroitly withheld until the end.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A world-famous crisis manager, hostage negotiator, national security expert, deputy assistant secretary of state, and psychiatrist is the only man who can save the world from a fiendish multinational plot to restore multinational tension. Author Pieczenik (Blood Heat, 1988, etc.) is a world-famous crisis manager, hostage negotiator, national security expert, former deputy assistant secretary of state, and psychiatrist. While relaxing with a geisha in a Tokyo hot tub after the rigors of a tricky, testy day of binational negotiations, Desaix Clark is landed with a particularly tricky problem. Why has the corpse of America's leading expert in Russian studies come crashing through the shoji screen from the room next door? And, come to think of it, why was the dead Russophile sent to Japan with Clark's negotiating team when he should have been in Washington, where the post-Bush administration is coping with a Russian-American face-off in Germany? And who on earth would use tooth-protecting fluoride as a murder weapon? Clark finds, when he returns to the States, that the answers to these and other alarming questions all have something to do with matching secret plots in both Washington and Moscow, which also have something to do with a plot to prove the President insane when he's actually just suffering from the same rare medical syndrome that Abraham Lincoln might have had. About the only person the sexually irresistible Dr. Clark can find whom he can trust as he battles the diabolical bureaucrats in the effort to save the world is the attractive, sometime sapphic chief of the President's security detail. As Clark shoots his way through the decadent federal city, the president of the Russian Republic is pursued by a deadly descendant of the beloved poet Pushkin. Heats up every once in a great long while. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

An unusual hero makes his debut in this geopolitical thriller, which pits the Russian and American heads of state against their own security aides. Desaix Clark is a psychiatrist and crisis manager who not only tutors major multinational corporations in psychological principles but also serves in the president's inner circle. The author, who himself followed this unusual career path, conveys a sure grip of technical information and peppers the narrative with literary quotes. But he also relies on a degree of vicious and manipulative violence that overshadows his innovative merit. In addition, his penchant for loading up characterizations with irrelevant details distracts from the narrative. Finally, while a far-fetched plot is not a handicap in this genre, the double- and quadruple-crosses of this plot are so convoluted that its amusement value dissipates early on. Not an essential purchase, though libraries owning Pieczenik's Blood Heat ( LJ 4/1/88) and the out-of-print The Mind Palace may get requests.
-Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.