Forty-eight X: The Lemuria Project

In Pollack's clunky debut, Israeli military intelligence hires archeologists Fala al-Shohada, a beautiful Egyptian, and Joshua Krantz, Fala's handsome Israeli lover, to find the person responsible for the slaughter of dozens of men at a terrorist camp in Pakistan with, apparently, a hand scythe, a weapon used by Alexander the Great's soldiers in the third century B.C.E. Meanwhile, Maggie Wagner, a Ph.D. student in genetics at Princeton, who suspects her late father, a Nobel laureate Stanford professor, was not a suicide, begins her own probe into a project code-named Lemuria (after the legendary ancient civilization) that her father had been investigating. The two plot lines, laden with by-the-numbers scenes of sex and violence, converge on the island of Diego Garcia, where chimpanzees wearing bow ties serve dinner to Fala and the American colonel who trained the primates to be waiters. By then, many readers will have already bailed out. (Dec.)