cover image Zero Philadelphia

Zero Philadelphia

James Douglas. Marlowe & Company, $22.95 (608pp) ISBN 978-1-56924-749-5

Written pseudonymously by a Zurich attorney, this cartoonish cliffhanger is hyped as having been a 1995 bestseller in Europe. Ken Custer (code name Keycop) is a former CIA agent who has sunk to the role of money-laundering genius for the kingpin of a Colombian drug cartel. Sent to buy two miniature nuclear devices from a megalomaniac Swiss arms dealer, Custer finds himself the target of a worldwide manhunt and winds up in the middle of a plot in which Iran plans to nuke Philadelphia on the Fourth of July and put the blame on Saddam Hussein. After Custer gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Stefanie Kramer, a young investigative journalist who has stumbled onto the plot to sell bombs to the bad guys, the action blurs into a kaleidoscopic mob scene. Warring drug lords, high-tech mumbo-jumbo, the search for fulfillment and true identity, true love, enlightened parenting, exotic herpetology, altruistic environmental issues, international political blackmail, hair-raising escapes and a surfeit of gratuitous and lurid sex clutter a narrative that has as many corpses as commas. With a trio of plucky, marooned Swiss kids caught in the middle of the doomsday scenario, Douglas's novel reads like a bad parody of a James Bond film. (July)