cover image Sooner Spy

Sooner Spy

Jim Lehrer, James Lehrer. Putnam Publishing Group, $19.95 (222pp) ISBN 978-0-399-13536-1

Mack, the one-eyed lieutenant governor of Oklahoma who swashbuckled through Lehrer's Crown Oklahoma and Kick the Can , mixes it up with Russian spies in this wacky takeoff on the espionage genre. It seems that the president of a local Rotary club is actually a defected KGB operative, and an Afghan killer agent is on a mission to silence him. But the wrong man is targeted; the real defector turns out to be someone else, identifiable by his penchant for singing the score of the Broadway musical Oklahoma. Mack, whose hobby--filching intercity bus paraphernalia--will come back to haunt him, is surrounded by the usual oddballs. His son Tommy Walt opens a restaurant-grease recycling business; his wife, Jackie, expands her chain of drive-thru grocery stores; Governor Buffalo Joe Hayman schemes to sell off the Sooner State piecemeal to the Japanese. Lehrer (who co-anchors the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour ) spoofs everything from open-casket funerals to college graduations in an Oklahoma teeming with FBI agents, dental technicians, televangelists and roadside advertising sculpture. (Mar.)