What Rough Beast?

This ambitious, thoughtful novel about the generation that lost its way in the '60s stars a crusty, cynical North Carolina PI who gets entangled in two quests--one for a missing boyhood friend who has become a street preacher after a stretch in jail, the other for a serial killer who preys on girls at campgrounds. First novelist Hill delivers a fully realized portrait of Randolph Gatsby Sierra, who has kicked drugs, booze and cigarettes but still loves sex, blues and books. Randy has turned 180 degrees to the right; his complaints about the decline of Western civilization are offset only by his dedication to a moral code under which he tries to do good in a world dominated by evil. Today's kids, he believes, ``try to live in a TV commercial and it doesn't measure up, so they get high. It's Brave New World right here in River City.'' The former Navy SEAL and martial arts master is hired by old high-school friend Sarah Diehl, now a rich Florida widow, to find her ex-sweetheart and his friend Happy Fox, and to learn, if possible, why their generation has fallen from grace. Randy finds Happy in California, where his son, a onetime druggie, has vanished while trying to rescue a friend from Manson-like desperadoes and dope dealers in the wilderness. Randy and Happy arm themselves with the latest in military technology to hunt down the barbarians. In the process Randy learns that he has underestimated kids. His anticlimactic confrontation with the serial killer when he returns to North Carolina doesn't spoil this fine launch of a projected series. (Nov.)