WHIT MASTERSON – Hunter of the Blood. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1977. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. No paperback edition.

   A schizophrenic priest with a message threatens Rome with nuclear disaster during the Pope’s annual Easter sermon. Gus Gamble is the only man who knows that plutonium stolen from a Nevada nuclear fuel facility has actually been smuggled into the Vatican, but he’s frustrated at every turn by bureaucratic disbelief.

   Gamble is a priest working Las Vegas blackjack tables when he’s persuaded to reassume his former duties as head of security for the AEC. He’s what might be called a born manhunter, that rather unlikely sort of individual who can miraculously turn up clues that hundreds of other investigators have already passed over. Unfortunately his intuitive conclusions are too often only partially based on hard evidence.

    Masterson doesn’t quite succeed in arguing that one man surrounded by massive manpower in the computer age can be the only one to come up with the right answers, but he will cause a few palms to start sweating as the big boom approaches.

[UPDATE] 04-18-11.   I don’t remember this one at all, but since I gave the book a rating of “B” at the time, I obviously enjoyed it.

    “Whit Masterson” was, as we know now, one of Robert Wade’s pen names. The first few Masterson books were collaborations with Bill Miller, but when the latter died in 1961, Wade took over the name alone.