TALONS

A hint of Hitchcock, a pinch of Ibsen, a touch of Peter Benchley, and Bruce the Shark now glides on thermals over Manhattan, menacing the millennial World's Fair. No, it's not really a shark, it's a giant berkute (eagle) with a 12-foot wingspan, the genetic mutation of a pair of eagles who mated in the radiation-filled winds over Chernobyl. Raven Lokka, an American diplomatic attachÇ with a lust for falconry, is given the baby eagle in the Ala-Tau mountains of Kirghizia and takes it home to Minnesota, where he attempts to train it. When Brunhild, the eagle, flies off with Lokka's baby son, and then his wife commits suicide in despair, Lokka vows revenge. Four years later, in 1996, when the eagle has matured, Lokka hears of a giant raptor chewing up folks in Manhattan. And we hear of New York's mayor maddened by the possibility that the New York's World's Fair will not come off because of that enemy of the people, Brunhild. Enter Antonia Meadows, Curator of Birds at the Central Park Zoo, a divorcÇe with one child, who lives high, high up in a penthouse with a beautiful terrace open to the heavens. When the eagle kills her zoo's star panda, Antonia teams up with police lieutenant David Torino, who was the first to determine that the city's rash of strange disembowelings came from a giant bird. What plot there is serves as casing for overgenerous amounts of filler about raptors—but, then, wasn't Moby Dick like that about whales? Does it take storytelling genius for a vengeful Brunhild to snatch Antonia's child from her terrace and carry him still alive to her big nest atop the Woolworth Building? Is there a reader alive who won't remember a giant ape falling, falling...or Ahab lashed to Moby Dick, or Bruce gobbling up crusty old Robert Shaw—and not expect to see Raven Lokka and Brunhild locked in a death embrace above the gargoyles of Woolworth? No disappointments! All stops pulled out on schedule.