The Assistant

What's at stake in Law's first book, a fast-paced thriller, is nothing less than peace in the Middle East, and it rests on the shoulders of Ben Poltarek, a young American Jew who doesn't immediately realize he's a crucial link in a legacy of assistants, or sayanim, who make up ""part of Israel's secret army abroad, soldiers who held no rank, wore no uniform, received no recognition...."" Ben's father has been a sayan for 40 years, and the night he and his wife are killed in a hit-and-run, a bleeding man stumbles into Ben's house, delivers sensitive information meant for Ben's father and promptly dies of multiple bullet wounds. It takes many pages of background information to explain the events leading up to this deadly and mysterious case of mistaken identity, which boils down to two hunters, each hunting the other. Jamal is a psychotic Palestinian terrorist obsessed with carving a Palestinian state out of Israel, whatever the cost. Landau is his Israeli archenemy, determined to destroy Jamal and restore peace to the long-embittered negotiations. Working alone, the madman Jamal has scripted Palestine's path to sovereignty. His plan involves manipulating the president of the U.S., the president's son, and the wife of a murdered Palestinian diplomatDand it's into this danger that Ben wades with the help of his devoted fianc e, Rachel, secretly a sayan herself. Though fast-paced and exciting, the narrative suffers from an excess of action without the psychological character building required to make the reader care about the targets of all the bullets pinging around. The key characters strain credulity when they repeatedly make guesses that are too conveniently accurate. Nonetheless, Law successfully moves his narrative from Washington, D.C., to the Middle Eastern desert, to Paris and back to D.C. with barely a pause for breath, and his complicated, clever plot makes for an authentic page-turner. (July)