CARNIVORES

Revenge-melodrama in the sub-Death Wish tradition--with a couple of twists along the crude, lurid, implausible way. The macho narrator-hero here is Jason Coulter, a Salt Lake City cop who's working on a serial-murder case: young women are being raped, kidnapped, and murdered by a psychotic twosome. Soon, with unlikely ease, Coulter and his partner identify the culprits--a pair of biker-creeps, aided and abetted by their sleazy lawyer (another psycho). But there's no hard evidence to pin on these monstrous slimeballs. And then Coulter's brand-new girlfriend, dancer Jennifer, disappears from her bloody car in circumstances that make it clear that she's the latest victim of the psycho-villains. So naturally Coulter decides to take the law into his own hands. He more or less resigns from the force, sneaks off to San Francisco to buy guns, steals a motorcycle, and assassinates two of the psychos in a series of ambushes. . .before learning that Jennifer is alive, kidnapped by another psycho altogether! For the finale, then, Coulter must rescue Jennifer and face the two remaining psychos in a showdown at the zoo--complete with man-eating tiger. Derivative but efficient pulp-violence, from a first novelist with a smidgen of lean, mean promise.