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THE JACAMAR NEST by David Parry

THE JACAMAR NEST

by David Parry & Patrick Withrow

Pub Date: Jan. 24th, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07004-7
Publisher: St. Martin's

Arab terrorists launch an all-out campaign of industrial sabotage aimed at consumer goods—their only adversaries a CIA man turned insurance investigator, his old boss, and an attractive brewery employee. Guess who wins. In the day or so it takes unglamorous, resourceful maverick Harry Bracken to figure out how somebody succeeded in adulterating an apparently random sample of King Kohl beer (which now causes violent vomiting to a lucky few), the somebody—cash-strapped terrorists calling themselves the Jacamar Corporation when they visit afflicted companies to make their high-tech blackmail pitches—has broadened its targets to include fast-food burgers that provoke instantaneous bleeding and cars that accelerate from park after their brake pedals have been tapped three times. The bad guys—fanatical Ismail Gezmis, coldhearted Marjorie Brooks, front-man Felix Tidyman, and innumerable throwaway underlings—are laughably evil, but the scenes of fast-food chains and sports sedans under siege are amusingly inventive. Moreover, first-novelists Parry and Withrow have given Harry an appealingly implausible affair with midlevel Kohl exec Alex O'Connor, who jumps ship (the founder's weaselly son, like the Lee Iacocca clone who runs the auto company, is all too ready to cover his reputation and his bottom line by paying off Jacamar) to help Harry and a wheelchair-bound old CIA warhorse named Biff bring Jacamar down by jetting to a lot of colorful locales, getting shot at, bombed, taken for a ride, etc. Bright and fast-moving, with a deceptively light touch throughout—a perfect vehicle for a Hitchcock film. A sequel is promised, and welcome.