MAKING GOOD AGAIN

With The Rose of Tibet, Lionel Davidson established himself as one of the most enterprising entrepreneurs in the genre of adventure since John Buchan. Now quieting down, even giving way to some of the muzzier moralizing of say Morris West, he has lost some of his panache. He also does not succeed in tempering the Nazi war guilt in the past with absolution in the present. Vide the title. . . vide the central action of the book which deals with a restitution case. Coming to Germany from England, representing the Bamberger estates, is one James Raison on the one hand; and from Israel, a Rabbi and a doctor of law, Grunwald, who has a lien on some of Bamberger's money for a refugee organization. Together they work with the German representative Heintz Haffner (whose daughter, Elke, has an affair with Raison) and it becomes necessary to establish whether Bamberger is really dead. Sometimes you can't see the trees for the woods--as this one goes in and out of the Bavarian forest, via Dachau, in a fairly circuitous fashion. ""The dead they can't repay,"" intones Grunwald (he barely survives in between heart attacks) but by the close everyone settles up--even Heintz Haffner ""in a new dawn, a fresh start."" Easily written, too easily in spots, but the theme may hook that market that has been reading ever since the next to original Exodus. The paradox-parallel is easy to make: out of the ashes, modern Germany--but does Making Good Again necessarily milan doing well?