cover image Innocent Blood

Innocent Blood

Christopher Dickey. Simon & Schuster, $23 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-684-84200-4

Dickey, a journalist who is now Newsweek's Paris bureau chief, pulls a lot of recent headlines into a surprisingly stable synthesis in order to get inside the head of a terrorist. ""I come from Westfield, Kansas, down near the Oklahoma border. Flat lands. Pickup truck lands."" Thus does Kurt Kurtovic introduce himself. The very fact that Kurt, the son of Yugoslavian immigrants, could be the boy next door carries us along through the first section of the book. After an alienating childhood and his Muslim father's death, Kurt becomes a U.S. Army Ranger. Dickey shows us his arduous training and moves on to the richly detailed horrors of duty in Panama and the Gulf War--all of this informed by Kurt's inability to make personal connections in a smug America. By 1991, when Kurt has left the Army and is in Zagreb trying to find some traces of his father's life, we know him so well that his decision to join up with the mysterious Rashid seems natural. When that decision brings him to New York and a looming act of terror, it's all made credible by what we have learned about the men behind it. By adding Panama and the Gulf War to the Bosnian plot, Dickey does slightly overstuff his novel with yesterday's news. But at the center of it all is a powerful, plausible story of one man's transformation from a Kansas schoolboy into a Muslim terrorist. The pace is fast, and Dickey succeeds admirably in showing both the psychology and the impeccable, chilling logic that can underlie the most violent behavior. (June) FYI: Christopher Dickey is the son of the late poet and novelist James Dickey, author of Deliverance.