THE WAR AGAINST GRAVITY

A quirky, ever-so-chic tale of death, fast cars, and ecotage in the Pacific Northwest, and a young woman in over her head, from Oregon journalist Rosemary, whose background in environmental issues and their local implications is amply applied in this debut. Waif-like Devin Carey, eking out an existence in Oregon as a radio newshound, finds life suddenly out of her control when she and a close friend, Marlow, at the station are fired for taking liberties on the air—and when Marlow dies soon thereafter under mysterious circumstances. Already tied to the monkey-wrench underground by virtue of her long association with a hard-driving, secretive California couple, Dana and Claire the Ice Queen—who became her ``adopted godparents'' when she was a teenager—Carey learns more about a shadowy, highly successful band of ecoterrorists called the S&D Group than is good for her when she investigates her friend's death. Taken under Dana's wing for protection (and also into bed to resume an old affair), she's moved from one safe house to another to foil the FBI search for her, and is eventually told why: because a Group plan to destroy the equipment of a CIA-financed air-transport company that had eliminated all local competition, blatantly carrying out dirty tricks in the region and elsewhere, involved virtually everyone she knows, including the dead Marlow. When the FBI grabs a couple of mercenaries and the coast is again clear, Carey decides to go back to live with her garden-happy grandmother in California. In the tradition of the late Edward Abbey, first-novelist Rosemary's ecoyarn is reduced mostly to ecoglitter and West Coast trendiness, with more activist yakking than action. Environmentally friendly, but a dud.