Hacks

Trite plotting and overdrawn, unsympathetic characters undermine this heavy-handed but very knowledgeable satiric thriller about foreign correspondents from New York Times reporter Wren. When priggish journalistic ingenue Cassandra Benoit, a stringer for public radio, arrives in the fictional besieged Marxist republic of Equatoria, she immediately locks horns with 40-year-old newspaper reporter T.K. Farrow. Cass's fresh, energetic reporting sends the jaded T.K. and his colleagues scrambling to keep up and eventually forces T.K. to collaborate, grudgingly, with this amateurish ""news twink."" T.K. and Cass soon find themselves in a love affair made problematic by their contrasting philosophies, her meteoric rise to prominence and TV exposure and the escalating violence all around them. Neither T.K. nor Cass is particularly likable, and the evolution of their relationship from antipathy to romance is depicted in banal fashion. In his first solo novel, Wren (coauthor, with Jack Shepherd, of The Super Summer of Jamie McBride) writes with conviction and humor of the day-to-day challenges of journalism in the field and doubtless has fascinating true stories to tell. But this tale becomes disappointingly hypothetical within its amalgamated fictional milieu--the novel, Wren says, is ""based, very loosely, on the civil wars I covered in Angola and Mozambique""--and its creaky thriller framework. (Sept.)