Governor Cool Hand Luke Gannon and his wife Nikki have received a number of threats. Not trusting his own state’s police and investigative bodies, Gannon goes outside to his Viet Nam buddy Elmo Finn to tighten up security. McClister fans will recognize Finn from a Victim’s Choice. Finn stages a mock assassination attempt to prove that he can slip past the governor’s security forces. He succeeds and he and Luke are renewing old acquaintances when they learn that Nikki has been kidnapped.

Gannon sets up a task force to find and rescue Nikki, which includes Finn and his CIA buddies. It does not take Finn long to focus on the paramilitary groups in Tennessee, and the race is on, as parts of Nikki’s clothing begin to arrive. Finn suspects that the Governor’s inner circle has been infiltrated, and so his battle is fought on two fronts, even as the novel switches abruptly back and forth from the paramilitary enclave to the mansion.

The cast in this story is huge, but regrettably most of the characters have no identity beyond the bare minimum necessary for their roles in the story. This tends to make them very forgettable. Even those who are fleshed out a bit seem, at times, to be mere pawns whose sole purpose is to advance the plot.

Although the story is complicated, it is, on the whole, predictable, except for a simple twist at the end. The narrative captures the full spectrum and flow of a character’s mental process, mingling conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories and random associations. Unfortunately, this is accompanied by dialogue that is clichéd, gratuitously racist, and sometimes just plain unintelligent. Double Deal will appeal most to those people who enjoy novels about Aryan paramilitary terrorists.

--Thea Davis