Counterstrike

This thriller's basic premise has a veneer of plausibility about it. Perestroika and glasnost , so heralded in the West, have not simply backfired in the Soviet Union but have inspired a high-level plot to assassinate their author, Gorbachev--at a Geneva summit meeting. The conspirators choose super-hitman Moran for the job, only to discover, after a last-minute decision to call off the plot, that the cold-eyed Moran doesn't relinquish a project of this nature once he has clamped his jaws onto it, and is ready to kill anybody, male or female (he particularly enjoys killing women), who gets in his way. The rest is nonstop action both on land and in the air as the CIA, FBI, KGB and Soviet military intelligence pool wits and resources to apprehend the deadly sociopath. Flannery, whose novels include Moscow Crossing and The Zebra Network , doesn't bother with literary grace notes, but he seems to have some knowledge of the infrastructure of U.S. and Soviet intelligence services, and he certainly knows how to keep a high-speed international suspense caper rattling along. (Oct.)