<B>A real-life firefighter’s scorching tale</B> Earl Emerson, a 24-year veteran of the Seattle Fire Department, is best known as the author of two popular series featuring Thomas Black and Mac Fontana. In <B>Vertical Burn</B>, he introduces a new character, Seattle firefighter John Finney. Firefighting is a family tradition for the dedicated Finney, with grandfather, father and brother all in the profession.

"It was the most interesting job in the world. Getting up in the middle of the night to do who knows what. Anything could be out there waiting for him. Absolutely anything," Emerson writes. As it turns out, something very bad is waiting for Finney. One night, and one devastating warehouse fire, change his life forever.

Only Finney is convinced that the Leary Way fire on that fateful June evening is arson. Adding to the mystery, Finney’s crew arrives first on the scene when at least five truck companies should have been dispatched ahead of them. Events spiral out of control. Finney escapes the burning building; his partner does not. Heat stress and carbon monoxide poisoning cloud his recollection of the events.

Firefighting, like all professions, has its cardinal rules. Foremost, it’s bad to lose a partner in a fire, but unforgivable to be the cause of that loss. The worst thing a firefighter can do is panic, and Finney stands accused of just that. Burned, depressed and tormented by survivor’s guilt, Finney becomes obsessed with the Leary Way fire. As a result, his credibility and career suffer. However, as Finney attempts to unravel a sequence of apparent coincidences, his life gets much worse. Is it a sinister conspiracy or a case of paranoia? The tension escalates as Finney tries to save not only his career, but possibly his life as well.

Emerson gives us a ringside seat to firefighter protocol and procedures intermingled with relentless suspense. The details are realistic, including techniques to clear smoke from buildings, engines versus ladder rigs and the Knox Box (which allows firemen to enter commercial buildings without breaking down the door). <B>Vertical Burn</B> sizzles with excitement, plenty of Pacific Northwest atmosphere and a harrowing finale. It’s a convincing tale populated with the courageous individuals who fight fires and the scoundrels who set them. <I>C.

L. Ross reads, writes and reviews in Pismo Beach, California.</I>

With the release of Masquerade in 1996 Gayle Lynds joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le CarrŽ. That novel was a paranoid tour de force about a CIA agent, Liz Sansborough, hunting (and being hunted by) a notorious Cold War assassin called the Carnivore, who happens to be her father. The response to the stand-alone novel was so overwhelming (Lynds says readers “asked, begged and demanded” that she bring the main characters back) that Lynds was compelled to write a sequel. The Coil finds Sansborough far removed from her former life as a CIA operative; she is contentedly teaching a course in the psychology of violence at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But her father’s legacy continues to plague her, even from the grave. Someone has unearthed the Carnivore’s secret files (who hired him, how much they paid, who was killed, etc.) and is blackmailing prominent international business and political figures to further a shadowy agenda. Sansborough becomes a target as well; when her cousin is kidnapped in Paris, Sansborough must somehow find the files before more innocents die.

With breakneck pacing, generous helpings of suspense and intrigue, and a plot with more twists than a bag of pretzels, Lynds’ novel has all the ingredients of a terrific thriller. As Sansborough desperately searches for the Carnivore’s files while trying to elude the CIA, French police and an army of assassins, she makes James Bond look like a Boy Scout learning how to tie knots. Brutally violent, delectably complicated and masterfully researched, The Coil is a spy thriller of the highest order whose mind-blowing conclusion will leave readers slack-jawed in amazement and have them salivating for more.

Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Syarcuse, New York.

Don’t be surprised if this generation-spanning spy saga ignites widespread nostalgia for the days of the Cold War. It immerses the reader in a world of comparative political clarity, a time when clear-cut secular ideologies clashed on a grand scale. Robert Littell’s characters spend little time, though, discussing political philosophies. They know from the start which side they’re on. The Company of the title is, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency.

The story begins in 1950, just as the CIA is emerging from World War II’s Office of Strategic Services. By this time, the U.S. and Russia are already circling each other for global supremacy, their recent common cause against Germany relegated to history. Into this bubbling geopolitical stew come Jack McAuliffe and Leo Kritzky, Yale roommates recruited by the CIA to join its first generation of shadow warriors. A fellow Yalie, Russian exchange student Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, returns home for KGB training and reassignment to America as a deep undercover agent.

Joining McAuliffe and Kritzky for a series of missions that will continue until the Soviet Union crumbles is high-principled E. Winston Ebby Ebbitt II, a Columbia University law school graduate. In the years ahead, these three friends will be in the backrooms and on the frontlines at the Hungarian uprising, the Bay of Pigs invasion, various domestic upheavals and the Russian war with Afghanistan. We see them fall in love, marry and have children who eventually follow in their furtive footsteps. Unlike writers who use historical characters and events as backdrops for their fictional ones, Littell integrates them both seamlessly. The real CIA head spook, James Angleton, hovers over Liddell’s trio of fictional agents, alternately inspiring and outraging them with his mania for detail and his raging paranoia. Stung by the revelation that his mentor and good friend Kim Philby is a spy for Russia, Angleton is convinced there’s a high-level mole in the agency.

CIA directors Allen Dulles, William Colby, William Casey and others have speaking roles here, as do Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan. Glimpsed in the background are such familiars as William F. Buckley Jr., E. Howard Hunt, William Sloan Coffin and Frank Sinatra, his Rat Pack and gangster friends. Littell populates his narrative with colorful, inventive spymasters, chief among them Angleton’s Soviet counterpart, the pedophile Starik; the CIA’s hard-drinking and duplicitous Harvey The Sorcerer Torriti; and Israel’s eagle-eyed Ezra Ben Ezra, affectionately dubbed the Rabbi. Readers who lived through or who have studied the Cold War will relish Littell’s touches of verisimilitude his off-handed references to movies, comic strips, songs, personalities and books which were popular during the periods he writes about. In one scene, the Sorcerer praises Littell’s own then-current novel, The Defection of A.J. Lewinter.

Certain references, though, reveal either the author’s carelessness or else his taunting of readers to be attentive to the kind of minute details by which spies live or die. For example, he has President Kennedy recommending Catch-22 several months before it was reviewed in The New York Times. He has a character in February 1951, listening to the song Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, which he identifies as then being number three on the American top ten. Not likely, since the song didn’t even enter the Billboard charts until August 1951, and then rose only to the number 19 spot. His characters use such words and phrases as security blanket, maven and liaising, not, perhaps, before they actually entered the language, but certainly well before they became conversationally commonplace.

In the book’s final chapter, set in 1995, Littell makes it plain that even though the Cold War is over, the great game [of spying] goes on. He describes a man, code-named Ramon, waiting in his car in a Washington, D.C., suburb to pick up $50,000 for American secrets he has stolen for the Russians. That man was real FBI agent Robert Hanssen and it would be five more years before he was caught. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

The corpus delecti makes an appearance barely five pages into The Master of Rain, a classy noir whodunit set in the polluted and evil milieu of 1920s Shanghai. From there on, the action never looks back. Within minutes of receiving his first assignment, Richard Field, a fresh and idealistic English recruit to the Shanghai international police force, sees the horribly mutilated body of a beautiful young Russian woman, watches the beheading of a potential witness to the crime and becomes mesmerized by the victim’s neighbor, the alluring and enigmatic Natasha Medvedev all while trying to keep up with Caprisi, his blunt and cynical American partner.

Everyone suspects a sinister and powerful Chinese gangster named Lu is behind the brutal murder; the dead woman, Lena Orlov, is one of many young daughters of Russian aristocracy displaced by their homeland revolution who are working for Lu as prostitutes and dancers in his clubs. But it’s not that simple. Not only is Lu well-protected by an army of henchmen, he is also protected, to a certain extent, by his carefully constructed legitimacy in the business and government communities. And as Field soon finds out, no one can be trusted. In a dirty city, everyone appears tainted, even his colleagues on the police force, and Field must be careful in whom he confides. In order to save his life and pursue the investigation, he is forced to put his trust in his partner Caprisi, and even that last trust is eventually shaken to its roots.

Against everyone’s warnings, Field falls for Natasha Medvedev. He believes, even though she is maddeningly reticent, that she is the key to the murder of Lena Orlov and is, in fact, the next victim in what might be a chain of serial murders. He is drawn deeper and deeper into a personal involvement that clouds his judgment and endangers them both. The investigation and his attempts to get the truth from Natasha rush to an exquisitely crafted climax.

The action plays out over only a few days at a pace that never falters, and the characterizations, especially that of the city of Shanghai itself, are rich, full and colorful. Everyone has a story to tell there, everyone is lugging some kind of baggage, including Richard Field. An interesting side plot of just the right texture and force involving Richard’s relationship with his uncle Geoffrey, a Shanghai government official, and Geoffrey’s wife, Penelope, adds unexpected depth to Field’s character and creates one of the book’s several satisfying complexities. In the end, The Master of Rain is a good old-fashioned murder mystery. Its inherent danger, its passionate and idealistic protagonist, and its twists, turns and danglings make it a great read. The debut novel of Tom Bradby, a foreign correspondent for British television’s ITN, The Master of Rain is a dark, fast-paced juggernaut all the way to its cliffhanger ending. Sam Harrison is a writer and hospice nurse in Ormond Beach, Florida.