Maze

Rating:
Summary: Best Seller fiction at its best level
Review: One of the pleasures of reading this type of commercial novels a long time after they have been published, is that you do not feel like a useful idiot who follows recommendations, made in the Sunday newspapers. If you read it, is usually just because it fell on your hands during a raining afternoon, in which you do not want to watch T.V but you do not want to think about any complex issue either.

Here the KGB have discovered a system, whereby the mind of the president of the U.S.A can be pushed towards emotional reactions that will obliterate its rational capabilities. On the other side, the U.S.A. governmental agencies do not have a clue of what is going on. So as usually happens in these books the job to figure out what is going on follows upon the shoulders of a disappointed CIA employee recently divorced, with a big belly, highly critical of its employer but with a great drive towards individualism and imaginative thinking.

Rating:
Summary: a fine mini-Tom Clancy
Review: This book does not quite reach the level of the now-ubiquitous Tom Clancy technothrillers, but it is still an admirable effort by Larry Collins and an entertaining read. Mind control is the order of the day in this Cold War espionage thriller, and it is a fairly minor CIA man who must thwart the KGB plot. The angle is reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate, but this time the object is to control the mind of the sitting American president rather than to steer a mere assassin.