Passing Off

A second-string American basketball player spending a rough-and-tumble season with an Athens team is held hostage to a terrorist plot to blow up the Parthenon in LeClair's edgy but uneven first novel. The story is framed as the memoir of Michael Keever, a Continental Basketball Association recruiter who in his heyday spent 10 days with the Boston Celtics. Given the opportunity to play for the Panathinaikos team if he lies and passes as Greek-American, Keever hastily complies, moving his reluctant wife and daughter to Athens, only to find the city shrouded in pollution and the Greek fans fiercely hostile to American players. The lie is uncovered by Eleni Epimenidakis, a freelance reporter and fanatical environmentalist, who blackmails Keever to smuggle a canister of plastic explosives into the country. LeClair's manic prose is well suited to the athletic antics of his protagonist, and his vision of the lethal cloud of smog called the Nefos that hovers over Athens slowly eating away the Parthenon and all it stands for is a harrowing one. But his slim novel is so jammed with action and hoops jargon that Keever's motivations, his troubled family life and the conspiracy that envelops him aren't given much breathing room. Even so, this assured debut with its vivid sports scenes and suspenseful plot will undoubtedly score with readers. (Dec.)