Bookends the Red Fox

The narrator of this drowsy thriller, now being whooped as a likely best seller, is a U.S. journalist who specializes in the Soviet Union. An old love has asked him to help find her missing stepfather, a Canadian tycoon. As the hero searches, he unravels the mystery of her birth and the farfetched identity of her aristocratic Russian mother.

The action ranges across North America, France and darkest Russia, none of it convincingly in focus. In New Hampshire, for instance, Author Hyde has the Soviet bad guys, who are driving a small runabout, stop off at a farm to pick up a cord of wood, a quantity that would founder anything short of a sizable truck. Soviet village scenes do not seem any more real. The book's most enduring enigma is why, having equipped his tale with the scaffolding of romance, Hyde keeps his reunited lovers separate for all but a few exceedingly decorous pages.