GHOST DANCING

Below-average melodrama-cum-social-consciousness from Magnuson (Money Mountain, 1984; Open Season, 1982). It's 1987, and Jeremiah Gage still mourns his son Peter, a student radical supposedly killed in the explosion of a munitions plant that he was trying to sabotage way back in 1970. The 60-year-old Gage is a film director, now retired, once famous for his violent movies. As the novel begins, he's living on his ranch outside of Sante Fe with his young wife and daughter, and receives word that a picture of Peter was found in the possession of a murdered priest. This is enough to convince him that Peter may be alive, so he begins a rather tenuous and far-fetched search for him--and finds him living a few miles away with wife and kids. Gage and Peter have a few old father-son scores to settle (read: tedious flashbacks to the Sixties, Gage's divorce from Peter's mother, etc.), but they bond completely when Gage helps Peter (who is a member of a sanctuary group) save a Central American refugee trapped by cops in a church. There's little to recommend here--to either the reader of suspense melodramas, or even anyone still interested in Sixties arcana.