Dark Tracks

This second in a planned four-part mystery series featuring Nestor Dark offers superficial plot and detection work and sugarcoated characters, but enough action and exotica to keep the pages turning. Dark, the multimillionaire ex-SWAT sharpshooter, has funded the quixotic quest of his brilliant boyhood friend, Dr. Joel Tinker, for the possibly extinct Tasmanian tiger. When Tinker is murdered, Dark flies to Australia to seek out the killer. What he finds is a web of conflict involving a criminal Japanese multimillionaire who collects exotic animals, and international paper and logging interests. Rosenfeld (Dark Money) tones down the emphasis on Dark's rich-man toys here-although we are treated to a working four-foot submarine and a 350-pound Ultrabat airplane that assembles in minutes and can handle six times the Earth's gravity-and focuses more on Dark's character and background. Unfortunately, such characterization doesn't extend to Dark's assistant/lover, Isabelle Redfield, who is reduced to a clich6: the hero's plainspoken love/sex interest, serving as the damsel in distress. (Oct.)