THE MIND BREAKER

If you're willing to buy the premise that a master of psychokinesis can blow out the brain of a monkey at 500 miles (by inducing killer fears), then you may enjoy this slap-happy psychic-terrorist novel. Brett Leica, a researcher in psychic weapons for military use, has developed the incredible ability to release uncontrollable fear-dreams in any subject he chooses and, after having been hounded by the CIA, KGB, and others, he has gone into hiding with his wife for the past three years. But now he's been located by Vilas Daiton, leader of the U.S. branch of the ""Brotherhood,"" who (after surviving an episode in which Leica attacks him with a huge swarm of ""psychic bees"") contacts Hadaffi, the world's greatest terrorist and head of the Brotherhood; and together they plan a kidnap of both Leica and wife Jo. This kidnap is a success, the Leicas are separated, and butcher Hadaffi promises that lo will be dismembered, slowly, unless Leica obeys Hadaffi's orders. Leica gives in, of course, and, on a test-run, induces a fear-dream in Nick Oxley, a CIA informer and brotherhood member: Oxley's room on the 15th floor of N.Y.'s Hotel Taft suddenly begins flooding with muddy water, and he leaps to his death. Then U.S. President Manningham is given a half-power fear-attack and presented with an ultimatum: $500 million in a Swiss bank, breaking of U.S. ties with Israel, etc., or he'll get the double-whammy. So Frank Carmody, second in command of the CIA, has 48 hours to locate and nullify Hadaffi and Leica. Finally, then, after Jo dies in a mucked-up CIA aerial raid, the Brotherhood is folied--but Leica himself is on the loose and presents both Manningham and the USSR with a new ultimatum: disarmament or psychically-induced madness. Dumb but readable, though much inferior to Campbell Black's quite similar Brainfire (1979).