THE MAN WHO RAN AWAY

Thomas Bolinger, a reluctantly ex-patriated American (he was purged during the McCarthy fracas) is now an airline pilot for the Caribbean government of Quantos (obviously the Dominican Republic). After he flies a mysterious passenger from the States to Ciudad Torillo his usefulness to the dictatorship becomes suspect: he realizes that his kidnapped cargo was a well-known outspoken critic of the Quantos regime. Bolinger finds himself further alienated from the good graces of The Benefactor when the dictator confiscates his mistress. Eventually Bolinger becomes involved with Lisa Berger, the beautiful wife of a Nazi financier, and he agrees to help her escape from Quantos -- though he realizes that he himself has no place to go. He's captured, submitted to the refinements of Spanish, and perverted, methods of torture, nearly dies, is miraculously released, recovers, and escapes, -- with Lisa. For all its melodramatic twists of plot and far-fetched heroics -- in and out of bed -- the book is basically intelligent and far more convincing than an earlier novel, Maria Flores' The Benefactor (Doubleday), also based on the Trujillo regime.