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Edwin Kreiss is a former FBI agent whose discovery of a Chinese espionage ring made him a lot of enemies and resulted in his early retirement. Now his daughter is missing, and nobody, least of all a junior G-woman named Janet Carter, is going to keep him from finding her. Browbeating the one clue to her disappearance out of a terrified college student, Kreiss follows his daughter's trail to a deactivated federal arsenal in southwestern Virginia, where a fanatic whose son was immolated at Waco is cooking up a plan to blow the ATF to bits. Kreiss is uniquely qualified to play his role as hunter-in-chief. He's been trained as a "sweeper," a job title that refers to the cleanup of rogue agents and other enemies of the state, and he took a few high-tech search-and-destroy goodies with him when he was prematurely put out to pasture by his former employers. Now another sweeper wants to put him out of action, and Janet Carter's getting conflicting signals from her own superiors about just how much cooperation they're willing to give Kreiss as he sets out to rescue his daughter--and, incidentally, redeem his own troubled past. P.T. Deutermann is a skillful writer who knows how to tell a story. This briskly paced thriller almost turns the pages by itself. Carter, the ostensible heroine of the novel, never quite extinguishes her ambivalence about either Kreiss or the agency she serves, an attempt at multidimensionality of character that's more confusing than revealing. The ending hints at a continued relationship between them, but it's Kreiss, rather than Carter, who engages the reader's attention and whose future we really care about. --Jane Adams
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