Mongo is a dwarf, private detective, martial arts expert, ex-circus headliner and criminologist. He and his brother Garth are working on two separate cases - or so they think. In one, they are preparing a report as part of a special committee investigating illegal CIA activities in Haiti, a report that could put the Company permanently out of business. In the other, Moby Dickens - an ex-con sanitation worker whose girth nearly matches his namesake's - is having his poetry plagiarized. The trail in the first case leads Mongo and Garth to five brutally butchered bodies - all victims of voodoo ritual sacrifice. Surprisingly, the trail in the second case leads Mongo to the office of the ultra-conservative Speaker of the House of Representatives, William P. Kranes. Mongo's cases collide when Moby's body is also found mutilated in the same ritual fashion. One step ahead of local police and the FBI, Mongo investigates the connections between his two cases and discovers a plot that will not only put him and his brother face-to-face with death, but will change the history of the United States forever. Many of Chesbro's popular Mongo novels have featured megalomaniacs so ludicrously implausible that they might have emerged from a Batman comic book. This time out, the estimable dwarf--who also happens to be a former circus aerialist, martial artist, and world-renowned Ph.D. criminologist--is only battling the CIA, neo-Nazis, and Haitian voodoo terrorists, and the enhanced plausibility of the opposition makes the tale even more fun than usual. The premise is that Haiti has long been a wholly owned "asset" of a group of renegade CIA crazies who are plotting the assassination of the president and vice-president so that the right-wing Speaker of the House (a thinly veiled caricature of Newt Gingrich) will ascend to the Oval Office and will promptly put gays, people of color, pro-choice activists, and sundry others in their places--at the back of the bus, or under it. Even those faithful Mongo fans who may prefer Batman villains to almost-real-life bad guys will enjoy the ride. Thomas Gaughan When Mongo Frederickson casually remarks in the opening paragraph that ``we never went anywhere these days without our guns,'' you know you're in for nonstop action without a lot of big words or complicated ideas. This time America's preeminent academic/circus dwarf/investigator and his brother Garth (Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm, 1995, etc.) are up against a conspiracy that ricochets from a defrocked Haitian activist priest into voodoo to an ex-con garbage collector who wants to track down the person who plagiarized his poems to the reclusive vice-president of Guns for God and Jesus to a power-mad right- wing Speaker of the House who could only issue from the looniest corner of Chesbro's perfervid imagination. Less James Bond than Doc Savage, with a dozen weightless homicides filling the time while you're waiting for the cuckoo payoff. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Used Book in Good Condition