The Tower: A Facsimile Edition

The first several chapters of this psychological thriller offer a gripping rogue's gallery of psycho-killers and sociopathic behavior in a hellish setting from which no man escapes alive. The Tower is a maximum-security prison erected in San Francisco Bay to hold the nation's worst criminals. The worst of the worst, Allendar Atlasia (the weight of the novel is on his shoulders), executes a horrendous escape and creates a reign of terror in posh Bay Area neighborhoods. A purported genius, Atlasia delivers rhetorical gibberish in a highbrow diction aiming to mimic Hannibal Lecter's creepy intelligence but instead just sounding goofy. On Atlasia's trail is ex-FBI agent Jade Marlow (a man, despite his feminine moniker), who is teamed with the incredibly beautiful Agent Travers, who sports a blonde ponytail but is too hardboiled to have a given name. This arrangement is imposed by Wotan, the one-eyed, mysterious, fearless leader of the FBI. Jade is a Dirty Harry/Inspector Clouseau type, and while handsome and stout, he's a dull and dedicated misanthrope whose quite frequent cluelessness can be frustrating: a Phi Beta Kappa, he fails to recognize some of the most familiar lines of Shakespeare. He's bumbling as a super cop, setting up his own home as a target but posting no lookouts, losing his gun to his prey and stumbling into a tree when a pretty girl passes. Jade ultimately is the most inept yet conceited investigator since Maxwell Smart, although he seems to have superhuman strength even when the bones in his hips and legs are shattered. Though Travers gets short shrift in the chase, the reader might not miss her or any of the other crudely drawn secondary characters. This tale is mainly for those who enjoy graphic descriptions of grisly murders and who will believe the poorly delivered face-off between a monstrous criminal and his absurd nemesis. (Apr.)