A Conspiracy of Tall Men

Orwellian echoes haunt this provocative, tongue-in-cheek debut chiller about bureaucratic mind control. When the feds fly Linus Owens, a professor of conspiracy theory at a small San Francisco college, to Florida to identify his wife's body at the site of a terrorist airliner bombing, he's devastated to learn she was on her way to Brazil with a secret lover. Mistrustful of the government, Linus coerces the airline into supplying him with the plane's unaltered passenger list and sets out with a pair of fellow conspiracy analysts to find the radicals responsible for his wife's death. After the three academics pull off some fancy computer hacking, Linus escapes the spying eyes of his pill-popping, neurotic ""FBI"" (really CIA) babysitter and heads cross-country to track the culprits to their lair. Marital infidelity, an enigmatic terrorist group called Danton, the long-forgotten disappearance of a talk-radio rabble-rouser, pharmaceutical intrigue involving clandestine trials of a mind-control drug, government-orchestrated kidnapping and murder all figure in the plot. Linus's search turns up more dead ends than a street map of Washington, D.C., until, by the end of this suspenseful, cerebral satire, staying alive becomes more important than finding answers as the outraged professor matches wits with men in black. (July)