If you’ve read one Larry Bond novel (The Enemy Within, Red Phoenix, etc.), you’ve probably read them all. Of course, if you’ve read them all, then you’re like me, and you’ve continued to enjoy his escapist, globe-trotting thrillers and tales of semi-plausible headlong plunges toward the end of the world as we know it. Do the good guys win? I’ll give you one good guess. Are the bad guys really, really bad . . . I mean bad on a world-shaking, civilization-destroying level? Sure are. Is the technology pretty darned cool and yet at the same time frighteningly real? Yes again, and that’s the heart of Bond’s success, especially in his latest, Day of Wrath. Bond, who was an uncredited partner and consultant on Tom Clancy’s early books, knows his stuff, and his expertise shows in descriptions of everything from handguns to nuclear missiles.

The heroes of 1997’s Enemy Within, Colonel Peter Thorn and FBI Special Agent Helen Gray, return in Day of Wrath to battle yet another Middle Eastern terrorist overlord bent on destroying the decadent country of America. (One quibble: It seems sort of easy and predictable to make the villain an Arab . . . again. Surely there are bad guys elsewhere. In Bond’s favor, though: The top henchmen of key villain Prince Ibrahim are ex-East German secret policeman. It’s a new world.) The action moves from the forests of Russia to the streets of Berlin to Washington, D.

C.’s Virginia suburbs, with stops for gunplay at many places along the way. The reason for all the chasing is that Thorn and Gray are the only people who know the secret of Ibrahim’s “Operation,” a secret I won’t reveal here, but suffice to say the title of the book is appropriate. The duo is forced to take extreme measures to safeguard themselves and the secret in a typically nail-biting race to the “whew-that-was-close” climax. Along the way, the romance between Thorn and Gray that budded in the previous Bond book blooms brightly. Their between-the-gunshots romantic by-play seems a little forced sometimes, but gives a more human flavor to the out-there proceedings.

However out-there the plot gets, the kernel of truth and dangerous possibility that lies at its heart forces the reader to consider the “what-if factor.” I hope that if there’s a real Prince Ibrahim out there, we have more than just two people to stop him, but for now, the resourceful Thorn and the sturdy Gray will do nicely.

Reviewed by James Buckley, Jr.

n his latest thriller, Deep Sleep, Charles Wilson returns to one of his favorite themes: murder and mayhem triggered by a foreign invasion of the mind. The author of several best-selling scientific thrillers, Wilson has a knack for crafting riveting plot lines around kernels of scientific fact. In Deep Sleep, he focuses on treatment for sleep disorders, and ventures into a mysterious world of mind games played with hypnosis, Cajun voodoo and hallucinatory drugs. Wilson has chosen the South Louisiana bayou country as the setting for this absorbing tale of local culture with a 21st century face.

The action begins when a local deputy sheriff discovers the body of a young girl raped and beaten on the grounds of the South Louisiana Sleep Disorder Institute. The macabre scene reads like something by Edgar Allan Poe an antebellum mansion shrouded in mist rising from surrounding crocodile-infested mangrove swamps and partially obscured by hanging moss. When the victim is identified as a patient, Senior Deputy Mark French locks down the institute and takes a closer look at its fantasy fulfillment program, one that recreates wealthy patients’ dreams and fantasies with enough realism that they are recalled as true experiences by those undergoing the treatment.

French soon establishes that another patient is missing and may have stolen a car. Other suspects include a grotesquely deformed boy and his hardscrabble parents eking out a primitive living on the edge of the swamp, the institute’s sinister director and several members of her staff with violent criminal records. While tracking the missing patient through the steamy swamp, the deputies come across two more sadistically murdered victims whose deaths suggest that a second psychopath may be on the loose. The pace accelerates as French closes in on at least one of the killers. The stormy night scene of the hunters racing through a lightning-laced swamp with flashlights reinforced by a helicopter’s searchlight equals Hollywood’s best. Wilson is even able to weave a thin but appealing romantic thread into the violent tapestry that makes Deep Sleep a memorable reading experience.

John Messer writes from Ludington, Michigan.

Reading a novel by Sharyn McCrumb is like listening to the movements of a symphony: separate themes are introduced, explored, and expounded upon, until they come together in a melodic whole. The insistent note McCrumb sounds in The Ballad of Frankie Silver is the story of a young woman who killed her husband, and the justice that awaited her in the town of Morganton, North Carolina, in 1833. It is a true history that relies on the novelist’s art to make the theme of poor defendant versus upper middle class society resonate for our times.

Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, recuperating from a gunshot wound, has been invited to attend the execution of a man whom he arrested for two gruesome murders in the 1970s. To pass the time until the state electrocutes convict Fate Harkryder, the sheriff delves into the case file of Frankie Silver, a 19th-century woman tried and hanged for killing her husband with an ax. The connections he draws between the two defendants lead Arrowood to question his judgment about the Harkryder case. By the time Arrowood discovers further evidence that may exonerate Harkryder, it is almost too late to plead for the prisoner’s life.

McCrumb’s subtle storyline passes back and forth in time, as Arrowood reads of Frankie Silver’s miserable destiny in the writings of a clerk of the court that convicted her in 1832. Unlike most modern mysteries, the plot does not rely on a pool of suspects to lead the reader with clues. Instead, the building suspense is driven by Arrowood’s initial curiosity and gradual obsession with Frankie’s case, an obsession we follow as the novel slips between the centuries. Without a hint of preachiness, McCrumb leads us to consider the terrible toll of domestic violence, the assumptions rich and poor make about one another, and the barbaric anachronism of the death penalty. It is to her credit that these solemn issues never get in the way of a good story.