DREAM OF A FALLING EAGLE

When Mongo Frederickson casually remarks in the opening paragraph that ``we never went anywhere these days without our guns,'' you know you're in for nonstop action without a lot of big words or complicated ideas. This time America's preeminent academic/circus dwarf/investigator and his brother Garth (Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm, 1995, etc.) are up against a conspiracy that ricochets from a defrocked Haitian activist priest into voodoo to an ex-con garbage collector who wants to track down the person who plagiarized his poems to the reclusive vice-president of Guns for God and Jesus to a power-mad right- wing Speaker of the House who could only issue from the looniest corner of Chesbro's perfervid imagination. Less James Bond than Doc Savage, with a dozen weightless homicides filling the time while you're waiting for the cuckoo payoff.