Uneven but entertaining spy story. A soon-to-be law school graduate is recruited into the Defense Intelligence Agency to check out a shady company his former girlfriend, whom he is about to travel to Denver to visit after three years apart, is working for.

Guess what? Minor SPOILER ALERT

He is barely reunited with her and about to get her into bed, when she decides to take a shower first and is murdered by an assailant who apparently escapes down the fire escape. Now our hero is pretty mad, as you can imagine, although it doesn't take him long to start looking at other women.

The chase for the villains continues across the country and, luckily, for the protagonist, these are those movie-type bad guys who don't just settle for shooting you. Instead, they tie you to the undercarriage of a train and things like that. I won't spoil the first appearance of the mastermind of the gang, which is quite memorable. The thing that holds this book back from being better, however, is that the author can't quite decide what he is trying to achieve. Is it a Matt Helm-type spy story that deals effectively with death and destruction? Is it a farce with a wise-cracking hero who never blinks in the face of imminent death? Is it, as proclaimed on the cover, "For Adults Only"? Hershatter tries to have it all ways and it makes for a book whose parts are better than the whole. But these parts are quite good, such as the train episode, and the finale is pretty effective as well. I guess I was satisfied, because I'm already reading the sequel, Fallout for a Spy (also known as The Spy Who Hated Caramel.

There also seems to be a lot of autobiography here - Hershatter was a practicing lawyer in New Haven and had a military background. It appears there are at least four books in the series. ( )