The Titan Game

It's hard to resist a techno-thriller that begins with the line ``Weapons are ugly things at best,'' and although this suspense novel about a piece of high-tech hardware running amok follows a fairly conventional path after its opening, it's still crafted with more care than many of its slapped-together counterparts. After the death of his father, Jason Strick takes over the electronics company he built, and learns that its pet project, an armed robot, may be finding targets a little too eagerly. When Busch shifts the scene to Washington, the cast of characters becomes more familiar: a hawkish and influential senator, a married Cabinet member with a weakness for young women, and a president full of crackerbarrel wisdom. As in many novels of the genre, the characters are never as fully developed as the machinery, but 86-year-old Busch, whose credits date back to the original screenplay for The Postman Always Rings Twice and the novel Duel in the Sun , still knows how to keep the wheels turning. (Nov.)