HUNTER OF THE BLOOD

The ploot is missing, and ""the biggest manhunt in history"" is on. Ploot? Plutonium oxide, twenty kilos of it, enough for two Hiroshima-strength atomic bombs, stolen by--who? According to former AEC security man Gus Gamble (now a priest whose parish is a Las Vegas blackjack table), the schizoid culprit is Simon Stone, a man of the defrocked cloth whose idea of Church reform is substituting a mushroom cloud for St. Peter's dome. Of course, nobody buys Gus' theory (the brass is sure that Puerto Rican nationalists did it), so he's working solo in Rome, dodging the Holy Week crowds, and breaking his vows with Israeli spy Rayah who says: ""God will understand. . . . Trust me, Gus. After all, we've known Him a lot longer than you have."" If you don't mind the cop-priest identity crisis or dialogue that's a jam session for cliche virtuosos, you'll find this as sturdy as the models it borrows from (the smuggled-in-a-coffin trick again) and slightly less lavish in its bloodletting.