BEARING SECRETS

Another out-of-the-past case for surfer/shamus Wil Hardesty (The Innocents, 1995), who's hired, barely, by Holly Pfeiffer because nobody else will listen to her rantings about how her aging activist father Max was hounded to his death by the FBI. Despite nonstop battles with his intransigent client, who is truly her father's daughter, it doesn't take Wil long to trace the links between Max and the 20-year-old kidnapping of little Angela DeBray—an act of political protest-cum-fundraising that turned nightmarish when the girl's captors in the Army of Revolutionary Vigilance (ARV) killed her. Most of the ARV are long dead now, but the feds, who've always figured wild-eyed Max as the go-between in the snatch, just won't let go of Holly. Neither, it turns out (in the story's least inspired twist), will ARV lawyer Lincoln Stillman's wife Monika, who plans to grab Holly, turn her into ``the perfect terrorist,'' and farm her out to the dreaded Ammad Nassir, Scourge of Jerusalem. Closer to home, Wil finds truly monstrous skeletons fairly bursting from the closets of the Pfeiffers and the DeBrays: Back in the bad old days of the revolution, it seems, everybody knew everybody, and everybody did every unspeakable thing imaginable. If you can overlook the nouveau-terrorist angle—and you get an awful lot of other stuff to worry about—this tangled tale smolders like slow-fuse dynamite, and Barre skewers each sorry player with a master's deadly accuracy.