SAINT LOUIE BLUES

The car-bombing of a DEA agent on the trail of a well-connected drug ring operating out of tiny Richmond, Missouri, brings adventurer/mystic Stryker Stephens's Ki Foundation into the picture, as ""forensic consulter and expeditor"" B.F. Hopper (Old Black Magic, 1991) is dispatched undercover to Richmond to expose the perps. No problem, really--since not only does Hopper, buttressed by Stryker's bromides (""All hatred starts as compassion that is frustrated by circumstance"") establish instant rapport with everybody from the Chamber of Commerce to the police chief to the local biker-gang and its willing women, but the drug gang itself doesn't involve anyone higher up than the mayor, the D.A., the former chief of police, the local land baron, and his silent partner, a judge who demands constant bikerqueen service. So it's just a question of figuring out what to do with them, and Hopper, with the aid of a gaggle of handy advisors, has just the ticket: doping them with MPTP, which will give them all a permanent case of severe Parkinson's. Even readers enamored of Hopper's new-wave vigilantism may think it unfair that Tanner unloosed the full fury of the Ki Foundation on such a one-horse town.