The Killing House

When Special Air Services Capt. Timothy Bell guns down two captive Irish terrorists in cold blood, the elite British commando group fears it has blood on its hands. So, it washes them by firing Bell. Embittered and on his uppers, the ex-SAS man persuades a left-leaning plutocrat allied with radical Palestinians to bankroll the hijacking of pro-Israeli bigwigs at a banquet to be held at a posh restaurant in New York's World Trade Center. The troops enlisted to carry out this endeavor are the neo-fascist Anglo-Saxon Brethren. Rivers, whose most recent thriller, The Specialist, concerned counterterrorist operations, has here produced a fairly typical specimen of the paranoid terrorist novel. In addition to grappling with the various, implausible political factions involved in the plot, the reader suffers confused sympathies: Should we empathize with Bell, the put-upon ex-hero who has now turned into a heartless killing machine, or with the somewhat inept forces of law and order? The author's intentions are unclear. (February)