DREAM OF A FALLING EAGLE: A Mongo Mystery - Hardcover

When did that shrill, self-righteous note creep into the Mongo series, which started off with such a bang? Now, with the 14th entry (after Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm, 1995), Chesbro's once-fascinating mix of action, mysticism and liberal politics seems to have veered into self-parody. It always took a leap of faith to accept a hero like Dr. Robert "Mongo" Frederickson?a dwarf whose formidable intellect and physical skills carried him through some fantastic adventures. But Chesbro worked hard to keep Mongo as believable as possible as he and his full-size brother, Garth, wandered across an often magical landscape in search of some truly outlandish villains. This time out, the bad guys are the CIA: not just a few rogues but apparently the entire outfit. The Company is afraid that the brothers Frederickson's investigation into some tangled Haitian political murders will derail its plot to assassinate the liberal U.S. president and veep and install the right-wing Speaker of the House in the Oval Office. Said Speaker is described as having risen to power on "a poisonous, rushing tsunami of homophobia, antifeminism, and an entire devil's thesaurus of hysterical code words." Even this familiar premise might have been swallowable if Chesbro didn't stop every few pages to decry everything from the Aldrich Ames case to assault weapons. Readers who agree politically with Mongo will find the hysteria and vivisection tough going here; others will probably give up early.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Many of Chesbro's popular Mongo novels have featured megalomaniacs so ludicrously implausible that they might have emerged from a Batman comic book. This time out, the estimable dwarf--who also happens to be a former circus aerialist, martial artist, and world-renowned Ph.D. criminologist--is only battling the CIA, neo-Nazis, and Haitian voodoo terrorists, and the enhanced plausibility of the opposition makes the tale even more fun than usual. The premise is that Haiti has long been a wholly owned "asset" of a group of renegade CIA crazies who are plotting the assassination of the president and vice-president so that the right-wing Speaker of the House (a thinly veiled caricature of Newt Gingrich) will ascend to the Oval Office and will promptly put gays, people of color, pro-choice activists, and sundry others in their places--at the back of the bus, or under it. Even those faithful Mongo fans who may prefer Batman villains to almost-real-life bad guys will enjoy the ride. Thomas Gaughan