RANSOM

Ransom is one of those never-fail heists of the reader's nerves and sympathies when some more Children are Missing, if you remember that one. This time a school limousine is appropriated by conscienceless Greet, fronting for the Black Revolution, and Joybox, his aide, a stoned-out junkie. Aboard, along with its young driver, are six children from assorted homes in a suburb. Among the parents -- a black doctor who is by far the nicest type around, an advertising man losing his job, a businessman with a heart condition, still another with a stone cold wife, etc., and then personal histories are dubbed in with the present emergency to compound the original injury. All calculated to provide upandattemunputdownable reading -- which it is.