RICHARD SAPIR & WARREN MURPHY – The Destroyer #31: The Head Man. Pinnacle 40-153, paperback original, 1977.

   Threatened in this, the latest adventure of Remo Williams and his North Korean mentor Chino Chiun, is the assassination of a newly elected president who has a magnificent smile and comes from the South:

    “So the President is going to be killed. So what?” Remo said.

    “Have you seen the Vice President?” Smith asked.

    “We’ve got to save the President,” Remo said.

   This particular president is a gutsy individual, who refuses to spend his tenure in office as a prisoner inside the White House, but of course that only makes the job harder. Sapir and Murphy have come up with a neat theory of bow presidents since Kennedy have avoided being assassinated, and their coarse comments on how affairs in Washington are conducted continue to cut across the grain of teeth-gritting liberals, but there’s no denying that the first half of this book is much talkier than usual.

   Long-time fans of this series will be crying for the action to start, and anyone else should find an earlier entry and one more substantial to try their taste buds on.

Rating:   C plus.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 1978.