The Gemini Man

Steinberg gives a philosophical veneer to his fast-paced first novel of Pentagon eugenics and the superman who stands up to the brass. U.S. Gen. Alex Beck fashions a force of solo saboteurs from superior misfits in the military population and sends them on mostly fatal missions to wreak havoc in enemy countries. Beck and his bosses on the Joint Chiefs of Staff try to control these often self-destructive killing machines (whom they identify as a new race, Homo crudelis) with psychiatry. So when Beck's star agent, Brian Newman, is released after six years in a brutal Siberian jail (why the Russians didn't just shoot him is never explained) for killing thousands in a nuclear disaster, the brass promptly imprisons him in the gilded cage of an underground Munich sanitarium with a flock of arrogantly deluded shrinks. Once Newman escapes, however, he captures Beck and takes revenge on those who used and abused him. Can Uber-Rambo Newman overcome his own psychopathic tendencies and bring on a new millennium of super-humanity? Or does his evolutionary edge spell the end of the mediocre race that gave him birth? The perfectly open ending sparks impatience for the promised sequel. Simultaneous BDD audio. (Apr.)