EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD

Atkins, who experimented in Don’t Let the Devil Ride (2024) with grafting an international thriller onto a regional crime story, goes full tilt this time without ever betraying his roots.

Whether or not it’s true, as men’s magazine writer Dennis X. Hotchner’s agent has ruled, that “that old hard-boiled Mickey Spillane stuff is dead,” 1985 may just usher in a new period for the genre. Some time after deputy director Vitaly Yurchenko of the KGB’s First Directorate defects to the U.S., high school freshman Peter Bennett becomes convinced that Gary Powers, the bodybuilder who’s become the latest of the many men to share Connie Bennett’s bed, is actually a Russian spy who’s bent on hurting his mother and his homeland. Naturally, the Atlanta police pay no attention to Peter, but he does manage to attract the attention of Hotch, whose dreamy plans are backed up by the force majeure of Jackie Demure, a drag queen who once played defensive end for the Falcons. Meanwhile, federal agent Daniel J. Rafferty is sucked into lap dancer Trinity Velvet’s life when she shoots Larry, the ex who’s stalking her, with Rafferty’s gun, and KGB assassin Lisica, aka the White Fox, kills her asset Jennifer Buckner, a secretary and friend of Connie’s at Scientific Atlanta. Jenny’s purse doesn’t contain a crucial computer disk everyone’s looking for, but it does contain the business card of Sylvia Weaver, of the Atlanta FBI’s counterintelligence squad. Throughout the densely plotted complications that follow as these plot strands crisscross and tangle, Atkins never loses his sharp focus on troubled or wacky individual characters far more important than geopolitical struggles.

International intrigue in a series of amusing, arresting closeups.