A RICH AND DANGEROUS GAME

Lionel White used to be an excellent mystery-story writer -- now he's a movie-quickie writer -- and it's hard to say whether this should be reviewed as a novel, an adventure story, or cinema verite. Whatever, it's one of those self-evident plots with characters everyone will recognize unless they live in some unemerged African protectorate: namely Cosmos Papalias, a very rich rich Greek; and Jill (like in Jackie) his most recent acquisition as a wife via the U.S. and a political fatality; and a broke, broken down film director; and a jeweler Harry (Winston?) Weintraub who brings his fabulous diamond the Star of the Orient for Papalias to purchase; and a senator and his wife; and. . . . The point is that Papalias is going to sail his yacht across the sea to freedom with all his money in negotiables and diamonds and someone called Scan Haggerty is going to see that he gets the valuables and there's a murder, in fact two, and a hurricane, and anything else you want to put in the plot to keep it boiling. Including mention of a ""real sleeper"" of a book which became a ""free option"" for a film because some agent ""happened to see a review of the book in the Kirkus Review."" It wasn't this one.