Angela Sloan

In his third novel, Whorton (Frankland) has a fantastic narrator in the teenage Angela Sloan, so named by Ray, the undercover CIA agent who rescued her from the Congo in 1964 when her family was murdered. Back in the U.S., Ray and Angela live together in D.C. as father and daughter; Angela enters the ninth grade and Ray, now retired, falls into a drunken oblivion. But a former agent called Horsefly invites Ray to join his domestic surveillance outfit, and Ray soon finds himself entangled in Watergate. He flees to Baltimore with Angela, posing as a paranoid schizophrenic shut-in. His cover becomes a kind of truth when he sus-pects the building's desk clerk of being a Bureau informant and flees once more, this time leaving Angela behind with his Plymouth Scamp and the code word "Idaho" the only clue as to his whereabouts. Whor-ton gives Angela a distinct voice%E2%80%94simultaneously girlish and wise, and very funny. As the girl, at only 14, pushes her Scamp westward, a Chinese waitress stowed in the back, what unfolds is both a coming-of-age road trip through the freakish underbelly of 1970s America, and an affecting examination of identity. (Aug.)