CHAMELEON

The assassin is a woman, but aside from that it’s pretty much your granddaddy’s genre all over again.

Having escaped the clutches of her Magenta House spymasters (The Rhythm Section, 2000), lethal though lovely Stephanie Patrick is rusticating somewhere in the French countryside. She’s got an undemanding lover and the kind of sweetly pastoral life that’s gone a long way toward helping her forget she once killed people for a living. But here comes icy old Alexander, who used to run her, invading her backwater and blasting tranquility into yesterday. He’s been dispatched from Magenta House to bring Stephanie back into the fold for one last job. She’s to find and eliminate the mysterious Koba, an international terrorist who has brutally eliminated one of Magenta House’s own. And Magenta House wants payback. Make that happen, Alexander promises, and Stephanie will be struck off Magenta House rolls for all time. She takes the deal. First requisite is to scrape away the rust that rustication results in. She goes back into training, an arduous process described at great length. But at last she’s ready to pursue Koba, who is as much a professional chameleon as Stephanie herself. The hunt begins in New York, where one Konstantin Komarov proves a lot easier to find than Koba does—both a good thing and bad. Good because Stephanie falls desperately in love with the rich, romantic Russian racketeer, bad because, apparently, even the best professional assassins find it hard to be single-minded when they’re desperately in love. Magenta House, however, has no tolerance for such folderol, and Stephanie is forced to push on, leaving Konstantin to fend for himself—until, in the denouement, he plays a role that surprises him although it may not most readers.

Reams of expository dialogue punctuated by spasmodic bursts of action: more talk than thrill.