SOUL HUNTERS

Another busy thriller from the author of the The Goering Testament (1979), etc., about a Soviet acting troupe in London, a mysteriously seditious radio station in Russia, and a whacked-out American colonel with a secret stash of atomic land mines. Suave British counterespionage specialist Colin Rathbone is the thread that ties together this pleasant mess of actors, spies, assassins, soldiers, and priests. When the Soviet actors land in London, they include the great actor Evgeny Borisov and his leading lady and mistress, the gorgeous, ambitious, and spectacularly self-indulgent Maya Aleksandrovna Petrova. As Borisov, who has a devoted wife back in the USSR, plots his defection, Maya is lured (easily) into an affair with Sergei Andreyan, a high-ranking KGB officer attached to the embassy. Moscow, meanwhile, is trying to locate and destroy Rossiya Volya, a pirate radio station somewhere in Russia beaming some particularly bothersome programing. Unlike the BBC or the Voice Of America, Rossiya Volya broadcasts all the bad news of Soviet life from a scrupulously loyal and therefore dangerously believable socialist perspective. And then there's the problem of Colonel Blau and his carefully hoarded nuclear arsenal. Colonel Blau seems to have done away with the English chap sent in to find out where those NATO weapons have gotten to. Only Colin Rathbone knows how everything fits together and why. Charming Russians and a surfeit of plotlines keep this thriller hopping without breaking any new ground.