Redeye

Though fast-paced and generally entertaining, this latest thriller with an international setting brings together some overused themes in suspense fiction. Paul Stafford, an investigative journalist at the Washington Herald , has been having nightmares in which he commits murder. Like any writer with good material, he turns his dreams into stories, even including the names of the victims. But when the CIA shows up at his office and his German-born mother makes a confession, he starts suspecting the source of his dreams: the twin brother he never knew, who was given away as a baby in Germany and supposedly was killed after the war, is not dead after all, but communicating telepathically. Worse, he's an agent of East Germany's equivalent of the KGB, and has aligned with a faction that hopes to put an end to glasnost by assassinating the Soviet Union's new general secretary during a visit to Washington. Aellen's first espionage novel certainly keeps the reader involved, the dialogue is crisp and lifelike, but the device of contrasting the good and evil twins has rather lost its ability to thrill. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; paperback rights to Bantam; BOMC alternate (September)