SLINGSHOT

What makes this whodunit more, or different, than a whodunit is that whoever killed journalist Matt Cooper's father may be out to overthrow the US government as well. Novelist Frank Cooper's dying message to his son—a logo superimposing a capital Y on a capital U—leads Coop to Operation Slingshot, some scheme his father and three other Allied soldiers organized in the last days of WW II. But more than 50 years have passed since then. It's sometime in the near future, when a meltdown of American politics has produced a mordantly forthright rivalry between the Leets (Elites) and the Middies (lampooned as the Middiots). And precious few survivors of Slingshot are alive, well informed, and willing to talk to Coop and his comely young colleague Tina Mennen. Meantime, Rettung Internationale, a venerable philanthropic umbrella co-founded by Frank Cooper, has fallen into the hands of a Japanese industrialist bent on installing Middie would-be messiah J. Fenimore Quigg, an eminently buyable congressman of tub-thumping rhetoric and ludicrous underachievement, as head of state following a grass-roots coup dubbed Yankee Doodle. Frank, it turns out, was evidently killed because he knew too much about YD; he's left Coop an unexpected and inconvenient fortune of $220 million; Coop is being sued for $22 million right off the top by an ancient Nazi who insists Frank's latest novel libeled him as a war criminal; both Frank's butler and lawyer seem to be spying on Coop, and a lot of other guys are trying to kill him; and Sgt. Ed Nickerson of St. Augustine Homicide is ready to pull Coop in for his old man's murder. All right, the characters, from barefoot millionaire Coop on down, have no more depth than Popsicle sticks, but wily old pro Hunter (Sweeney's Run, 1992, etc.) knows how to keep things hot for them.