HALF NELSON

Activist Robert Rackleff, the fair-haired lord of Earth Everlasting, must be the most unlikely person in the world to receive death threats, and the most exasperating to protect when he does. He won't file his travel plans with the FBI; he won't stay away from the Oregon loggers who are covering for the killer of Ben Schecter, the reporter who blew the whistle on Dixie-Cascade subsidiary Creek Forest Products; he won't even register at a backwoods motel under an assumed name. So even though Tom Bethany (Head Lock, 1993, etc.) thinks he can shield Rackleff from whoever's responsible for the threats (the neo-Nazi crazies of the Brotherbund? Ben's implacable father Louis Schecter? Dixie- Cascade's front office?), it's only a matter of time before Rackleff's number comes up, and Bethany shifts gears from private eye to ultra-private avenger. Starting with the pumped-up, clueless leader of the Brotherbund, Bethany works out a deeply felonious revenge—assault, kidnapping, accessory to murder—as satisfying to his left-liberal audience as it is preposterous. A dastardly criminal conspiracy outsmarted and outsocked by a fairy-godmother vigilante: a tree-hugger's answer to John D. MacDonald's The Green Ripper.