Blueprint for a Terrorist

Scott's (No Exit sixth novel is a cross between The Day of the Jackal, Seven Days Till Noon and a Somerset Maugham short story about the manners of the establishment. Hammond Acton, a young industrialist, has devised a new state-of-the-art electronic-guidance system that can unerringly direct anything anywhere. Super-terrorist Karl Heinze, aka Argus, the man of 1000 eyes, plots to steal the device in order to blow up a British nuclear-power plant. Implicated as conspirators in this desperate venture are Gillian Ward, Acton's beautiful assistant, and Acton's sister, Cass, a virgin school teacher who finds her defloration uneventful when matched against striking a blow for the peace movement. Typical British reserve makes heroes and heroines out of dupes and the naive, and undoes the manipulators and the betrayers in a surprise ending. (October 10)