Hantu

Halkin's gripping tale of international intrigue is set during the opening months of the Korean War. British Intelligence receives a request from their Red Chinese counterparts, asking for a meeting in Singapore between a Chinese representative and agent Peter Ross, who earned the sobriquet Hantu, or ``ghost,'' as a jungle fighter in Malaysia during WW II. Ross still blames himself for the massacre of his small guerrilla band, including the woman he loved, during the closing days of the war. His new assignment reunites him with a comrade from those days and brings him together with another beautiful Asian woman, to whom he is inevitably drawn. While Harry Truman talks openly of using the atomic bomb in Korea, Ross and his associates plunge into the near-Arctic Manchurian winter seeking a hidden Russian base where bacteriological warfare experiments are reportedly being carried out in preparation for an all-out attack on UN forces. Tightly written and suspenseful from the first, British writer Halkin's espionage thriller (following his horror novel, Slither ) is a standard in the genre. (June)