My reactions to reading this book in 1995. Spoilers follow.

This is the first Perry I’ve read, and I enjoyed it.

It’s basically an adventure/intrigue story with sf elements very much in the background. The MacGuffin here that four intelligences services are searching for (one to contain the secret, the others to discover it) is an immortality treatment. Brief mention is made of its possible implications (including the interesting and plausible notion that people would become more averse to risk in a world where only accidents and crime kill), but it only comes up at story’s end and, to describe it, Perry has an agent rattle of a string of technical jargon.

Still, Perry tells an adventure story well. He uses three viewpoint characters, two secret agents. The agents, while capable and ruthless and violent, are a cut above what one usually finds. They don’t relish killing, have plausible motives, pasts they think about, flaws and strengths and aren’t ultra-competent. For instance, King, the villain and ex-agent for Terran Security, blows a job because he can’t contain his desire to urinate. (This book has a lot of explicit talk and scenes with bodily functions and sex. One minor character has a sexual perversion for dogs.) The chain of the novel’s events is triggered when his volatile temper gets the better of him and he accidentally kills the “contracted” lover of Venture Silk, the innocent spin doctor who gets caught up in the novel’s intrigue.

Perry does resort to a couple of clichés. Agent Zia Relanj has a whorish past and a history of sex abuse by her uncle. Relanj and Silk have the cliched romance that so often happens between man and woman in suspense novels. Still, it’s interesting since its based on deceit at the beginning with a generous helping of mutual lust. (As Relanj notes, there is more than one path to true love, and one starts with lust.) It’s a romance that doesn’t first get acknowledged with “I love you but “I won’t kill you” and then “I’d rather die than kill you.”

Though it’s primarily an espionage thriller, Perry does do a nice job with the sf background of a densely populated Earth of little violence, a generous dole (Perry rightly shows that living in an Information Age wil not make people more ambitious or intellectually smarter), and regulated procreation, a world with plenty of sleazy places. He also has a nice knack in showing how someone could be traced in such a world and creating its slang. ( )

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