Much nonsense has been written about prescience - but it's still a pretty good political thriller. ( )

This novel has provoked considerable media interest recently, arising from its central premise of an American Presidential candidate who, between securing the election victory and being inaugurated, is investigated following suggestions that he might be subject to undue influence from the Russian government. Far-fetched or what! More intriguingly, the book was published as long ago as the early 1980s, when author Ted Allbeury was enjoying considerable success as a writer of spy thrillers.

In this instance, President-Elect Powell has been steered to election victory through the agency of his politically adroit right-hand man, Andrew Dempsey. Dempsey, however, has a past, and had been arrested during a violent anti-American demonstration in Paris during ‘les evenements’ in 1968., aliong with his beautiful Russian girlfriend. While most of those demonstrators who had been arrested were released within a couple of days, Dempsey and the girl were detained for two months, and only released following the intervention of a questionable American diamond dealer with shady connections to Soviet Eastern Europe. Now, twelve years later, Dempsey has re-emerged, steering the complicit but rather two dimensional Powell to election victory.

Less plausibly, no one in the American intelligence services seems aware of Dempsey’s past. It is left to James Mackay from MI5 to alert them unofficially, having recognised Dempsey from his own recollections of the riot as he had, himself, been a student in Paris in 1968. He flies over to America and works along with the CIA to investigate Powell and Dempsey urgently before the inauguration.

I think it is fair to say that the espionage novel has moved a long way since the early 1980s, and, fortuitous future topicality apart, it is not difficult to understand why Allbeury’s books have been out of print for so long. He writes clearly enough, but his characters are conspicuous for their emotional and psychological flimsiness, and plausibility is rare indeed. Still enjoyable, but perhaps principally as a curiosity. ( )