MAXIMUM VIGILANCE

A world-famous crisis manager, hostage negotiator, national security expert, deputy assistant secretary of state, and psychiatrist is the only man who can save the world from a fiendish multinational plot to restore multinational tension. Author Pieczenik (Blood Heat, 1988, etc.) is a world-famous crisis manager, hostage negotiator, national security expert, former deputy assistant secretary of state, and psychiatrist. While relaxing with a geisha in a Tokyo hot tub after the rigors of a tricky, testy day of binational negotiations, Desaix Clark is landed with a particularly tricky problem. Why has the corpse of America's leading expert in Russian studies come crashing through the shoji screen from the room next door? And, come to think of it, why was the dead Russophile sent to Japan with Clark's negotiating team when he should have been in Washington, where the post-Bush administration is coping with a Russian-American face-off in Germany? And who on earth would use tooth-protecting fluoride as a murder weapon? Clark finds, when he returns to the States, that the answers to these and other alarming questions all have something to do with matching secret plots in both Washington and Moscow, which also have something to do with a plot to prove the President insane when he's actually just suffering from the same rare medical syndrome that Abraham Lincoln might have had. About the only person the sexually irresistible Dr. Clark can find whom he can trust as he battles the diabolical bureaucrats in the effort to save the world is the attractive, sometime sapphic chief of the President's security detail. As Clark shoots his way through the decadent federal city, the president of the Russian Republic is pursued by a deadly descendant of the beloved poet Pushkin. Heats up every once in a great long while.