BRIAN GARFIELD – What of Terry Conniston? World, hardcover, 1971. Fawcett Crest, paperback, February 1974.

   The five members of a chronically out-of-work rock group (and a motley, unsavory group they are) decide to try their hand at kidnapping. Their target: Terry Conniston, the daughter of an Arizonan multimillionaire. After they grab her, though, complications set in. Things go wrong on both sides, but the comedy of errors is not funny à la Donald Westlake. The girl’s life is really at stake.

   Garfield deftly mixes dollops of marital infidelity and family discord, stock manipulation, a Chicano uprising, and Mitch Baird, an unwilling participant in the kidnapping. And Terry herself has her own attractions. The cliché about not being able to put a book down strikes again.

Rating: A minus.