A tightly packed adventure yarn with some touches of class. Middle-aged Josh Remington, an editor on a Time-like newsweekly, is having trouble with his actress wife (separate bedrooms for five years now) when he begins receiving weird phone calls from men claiming to have kidnapped his old service buddy Zoe Makris--a lecherous, greedy vulgarian who saved Josh's life when they were shot down over the Adriatic. Now the kidnappers want five million dollars for Zoe--and during one of the phone calls, Zoe himself tells Josh to find Ramona on the Strip. What Strip? Who's Ramona? Josh prowls the 42nd St. vice strip, latches onto a little kid who gets him Ramona's address (the kid is then thrown in front of a subway train). And Ramona turns out to be an odd, cello-playing, high-priced hooker who is really. . . Zoe's Greek daughter, a former Barnard student who hates her father because of a mined romance and a forced abortion that were his fault. Despite her hatred, however, Ramona teams with Josh, and they begin a trek through eight banks, collecting diamonds from Zoe's safe-deposit boxes (Ramona has power of attorney). But as they sell Zoe's diamonds and eventually fill two suitcases with the cash, they're being tailed by crooked cops. Eventually, however, the cops will get killed, and the twosome--after falling in love--will attempt to trade the ransom for Zoe. . . . Bullets, corpses, banks and diamonds, sex and repartee--a smartly-paced, not-very-original caper that never really grabs (totally unlikable Zoe is part of the problem) but does bounce along nicely.