THE MANHUNTER

A trash-talking exUS marshal presents his vision of what he calls ``the real world.'' Pascucci, an old-school proponent of law and order and a Reagan devotee, was a US marshal from 1978 to 1989. He tracked down a Nazi in Costa Rica, found The Falcon and the Snowman spy Christopher Boyce, and helped recover Dr. Josef Mengele's skeleton from its swampy grave. Coauthor Stauth (The Franchise, 1990, etc.) here uses his ability to let subjects speak in their own voice to devastating effect: Pascucci is crude, unreflective, and egotistical. The book begins with a look inside the tracking of Bodhan Koizy, nicknamed ``The Child Killer,'' a Nazi who had spent much of the period after WW II living in New York and Florida, and who quickly disappeared for parts unknown when the government finally took an interest in him. (Beginning in the early 1980s the underutilized marshals were given the job of tracking down international fugitives.) Pascucci takes readily to the Koizy assignment (his preference, he says, would be to ``track him, whack him, and sack him''). The fugitive is duly discovered in Costa Rica and turned over to local authorities, who seem not to care, and Pascucci zooms back to the US without revealing anything about his methodology, though he does discuss his passion for Coke Classic. Pascucci tracks other creeps, including Boyce, terrorist types, and a CIA turncoat, and when he isn't speeding somewhere in his Corvette, he's complaining about the modern legal system and pining for the warrantless days of Reagan. The story ends after Pascucci is fired for harassing the ex-boyfriend of his sometime mistress, and however welcome his remorse and ashamed hindsight are, they're too little, too late. While the occasional passage of soul-searching provides some insight into the mind of a tracker, this rant is sadly weighed down by cheerless bravado. (Author tour)