A Song in the Morning

The author tops Harry's Game and seven later successes with this new novel, the plot of which ramifies into extraordinary dimensions, affecting many people. The catalyst is the arrest of a British agent, James Curwen (aka Jeez Carew), in Johannesburg. After Jeez is sentenced to hang, along with four young blacks, he is effectively abandoned by the politically wary English government. Service with the secret intelligence agency had taken Jeez from his wife and baby son, Jack, 24 years earlier. Now Jack learns belatedly of his father's fate and flies from London determined to rescue the doomed man. In Pretoria, Jack meets a white anti-apartheid teenager and his sister, who provide the explosives that Jack sets off at the prisonthe climax to this unremittingly sustained drama. Former TV reporter Seymour injects realism into the South African locales and so humanizes the characters that one becomes strongly, painfully attached to them, a rare plus in a thriller. (February 23)