ATROPOS

Alan Trotter, the intelligence agent-hero of Snark, Cronus, and Azrael, returns to do battle with Soviet villains who plan to manipulate the American presidential election. The Soviets' secret weapon is their hold over Hank Van Horn, a liberal northeastern senator. It seems this liberal northeastern senator--member of a powerful political family--is an uncontrollable womanizer whose throttling of a pregnant staffer just happened to be caught on audiocassette. The Soviet price for silence is Van Horn's endorsement of the Soviet's choice for candidate. What Van Horn doesn't know is which candidate. He certainly doesn't know that one of the candidates is a dedicated but closeted communist. Meanwhile, Van Horn's nasty son Mark stumbles on the cassette, figures out what's happening, and begins to murder all the audio technicians who might have made the tape. But it's not entirely filial devotion that motivates Mark: he plans to be the Van Horn senator one day himself, which will never come to pass if papa is exposed. Superagent Trotter, son of the founder of America's most secret intelligence agency, has to sort all this out even as he is in the throes of a pleasantly steamy affair with his ostensible employer--billionairess and publisher Regina Hudson, who wants very much to have a baby. All the spy excitement here is made quite saucy by the resemblance--entirely coincidental, of course--between events in the life of the womanizing, liberal, northeastern senator and events in the real world.