THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

In a Parisian cafÇ, an American surgeon recognizes the man who killed his father 30 years earlier and attacks him in a burst of uncontrollable passion—plunging himself into a conspiracy to bring the West once again under the wing of the Third Reich. Though his father's killer gets away, Dr. Paul Osborn soon tracks him down and identifies him as Albert Merriman, a career criminal supposedly dead since 1967. Paul plans to eliminate Merriman after forcing him to tell why he killed George Osborn. But a violent twist leaves him with nothing but another name: Erwin Scholl, who hired Merriman to kill four men including Osborn Sr. Enter the American bulldog Det. William McVey, who's helping Interpol investigate the baffling decapitation of seven victims who show evidence of being kept in a cryogenic freezer, and who's naturally interested in the American surgeon who was spotted in London just a few blocks from the latest murder. As Paul holes up with his well-connected new lover, Vera Monneray, and McVey tries to figure out why anybody would want to cool a corpse down near absolute zero, Swiss stroke victim Elton Lybarger heads back home with his New Mexico physical therapist Joanna Marsh- -who has no idea of the key roles Lybarger and his assistant Pascal Von Holden will play in a plot whose like you haven't seen since The Boys from Brazil. The Hitler-lives climax is tired, shrill, and overextended. Up until that last hundred pages, though, first-novelist Folsom keeps his complex plot spinning with tremendous brio and momentum. Anybody with the remotest taste for international intrigue will be hooked from page one. (Film rights to MGM; Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection)