Reviews

A plague sweeps out of Africa to decimate the world's population. An American expeditionary force is humiliated by South Africans armed with a new generation of Japanese weapons. Israel is destroyed in a nuclear exchange. These apocalyptic events are only background in Peters's ( Red Army ) latest page-turner. To aid a disintegrating Soviet Union being overrun by a Japanese-supported Islamic army, America intervenes with the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by living legend Col. George Taylor and equipped with the top-secret M-100 super helicopter. Japan responds with the Scrambler, a neurological weapon so horrible it frightens even its users. But the Seventh has an electronic surprise of its own in this high-tech thriller that verges on science fiction. Although Peters risks offense with his portrayal of Muslims as bloodthirsty savages, he keeps firm control of the story as it speeds from Africa to Mexico to the steppes of Russia, and his understated style effectively conveys the grim nature of soldiering in ``twilight wars.'' Military Book Club dual main selection; Literary Guild, Doubleday and Science Fiction Book Clubs alternate; major ad promo. (Mar.)

Peters's latest futuristic war novel (after Red Army, LJ 4/1/89) eerily has some of the same circumstances and certainly some similar ``characters'' as the war in the Persian Gulf, even though it is fiction. The war in this novel is being fought by an Islamic-Japanese axis, which has attacked a post-Gorbachev Soviet Union weakened by a devastating civil war. Enter the Americans on the side of the Soviets; enter, too, the larger-than-life heroic figure of Colonel George Taylor, who commands a computerized aerial strike force called the U.S. 7th Cavalry. It should be noted that by 2020 the ``final'' Mideast War has been fought and surviving Israelis have been resettled in ``homelands located in the least promising area of the Far West.'' Peters, an Army intelligence officer, writes believably of high-tech warfare, but the fighters are real people. Recommended. Military Book Club main selection; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates.-- Chet Ha gan, Berks Cty. P.L. System, Pa.