Collision of Lies

In Le Beau’s so-so second contemporary thriller featuring U.S. intelligence operative Robert Hirter and German kommissar Franz Waldbaer (after 2009’s Collision of Evil), the rise of radical right-wing Austrian politician Georg Forster, who’s led his Nationalist Defense Front Party from obscurity to a role in Austria’s new coalition government, ends abruptly when he dies in a car crash in Bavaria. After Forster’s successor makes the incendiary claim that the car accident was in fact a hit orchestrated by the Israelis, the Germans open a homicide investigation. Waldbaer, assigned the case in part because he happened to be traveling in the crash area at the time, reaches out to Hirter, now assigned to counterproliferation, for whatever the CIA has on Forster. Le Beau, despite his 25 years in the CIA, fails to make the little details convincing. A predictable plot doesn’t help. (Mar.)