THE MONKEY HANDLERS

A Hudson River real-estate lawyer doffs his Clark Kent gear to take on neo-Nazi vivisectionists and Islamic terrorists in this supercharged romp. When animal-rights activist Sara Rosen is arrested after breaking into the Riegar pharmaceutical plant, she calls her brother Saul's old service buddy Michael Stone, a Viet-vet SEAL commando-turned-small-town lawyer, to defend her against charges of burglary and industrial espionage. Stone is no great shakes as a lawyer, but it doesn't matter: Before Sara can come to trial, Riegar's thugs trash Sara's apartment, hire bikers to terrorize Stone and love interest/public defender Stephanie Harrington (big mistake for the bikers), push his elderly Aunt May under a bus, and break into his house and attack newly arrived Saul; and Stone, realizing that he's up against something bigger than animal experimentation, rounds up three former SEAL colleagues and goes into no-holds-barred action. These guys are mean, and their lovingly described hardware is awesome--as it needs to be, since Riegar head Walter Hoess and coldly efficient security chief Helmar Metz are desperate to hide the fact that their ""monkey handlers"" are actually experimenting on Mexican wetbacks, and that they're preparing to recover Hoess' kidnapped son by loaning a hundred pounds of nerve gas to a suicide jihad en route to Manhattan (aboard a Japanese ship--let's be sure to cover every xenophobic base). Liddy (Out of Control, 1979) appeals powerfully to the frustrations and fantasies of audiences fed up with the system: this is just the thing for readers impatient with the rat race who wish they could arm themselves and click on.