MESSAGE FROM ABSALOM

Sheerer than the comparisons made (Evelyn Anthony, Helen MacInnes), this is still a silk-stocking suspense story trailing Susannah, formerly CIA, now an antiques dealer, on tour in Bulgaria where the man she had once known in the Service gives her a message to take to the president of the United States before he's shot on the street before her eyes. And following her is the omnipresent KGB agent Aleksei Azarov, who attracts her, salvages her (from a rape and an inquisition with a whip) and who seems to have been killed on her hijacked return trip home. The latter seems like just an addendum to plump up what is so easily read and unremembered.