Notable

THE HIT TEAM by DAVID B. TINNIN with DAG CHRISTENSEN 240 pages. Little Brown. $7.95

On July 21, 1973, in the Norwegian resort town of Lillehammer, members of an Israeli assassination squad shot and killed a Moroccan waiter thought to be the chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Black September terrorists. The man was innocent, the Israeli agents were arrested. Perhaps the most serious consequence of the blunder was that the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency responsible for the killing, lost its reputation for reliability. When, a few days before the October War, the organization produced plans for the Arab attack, Israel's leaders were not convinced that the plans were genuine.

The Hit Team is a tense, staccato account of this and other activities during the 1972-73 war of assassination between Israeli intelligence and its counterpart in the P.L.O. David Tinnin, an associate editor at TIME, and Norwegian Journalist Dag Christensen pieced together this story of international dirty tricks from leads provided by the Norwegian court that tried the Mossad agents.

Tinnin and Christensen date the origins of Israel's killer teams to Black September's murder of the eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The Mossad's first dozen victims were dispatched with silencer pistols or blasted in their hotel rooms or cars with plastique explosives. One of the hit team's victims turned out to be a coordinator of activities among Black September, the I.R.A. and Basque separatists. His replacement: the mysterious terrorist known as "Carlos," who in 1975 engineered the kidnaping of representatives of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The book provides the factual grist for a gross of paperback thrillers.

THE END OF THE PARTY by MARVIN BARRETT 219 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

An unsophisticated youth meets a glamorous, mysterious stranger, and Learns Something About Life. It is an endlessly employed formula that has generated such high and low art as The Great Gatsby and Auntie Mame. This first novel, The End of the Party, by Marvin Barrett, is yet another variation on the same theme. Here, the part of the glittering mentor is played by Dexter Hillyer, a Midwestern-born artist who rose to fame in the 1920s as a chic illustrator. Hillyer is seen through the few but vivid memories of his godson Emerson Mercer. The stages of his life are marked by his shifting reactions to the older man--from youthful idolatry through later disappointment to, ultimately, a mature understanding and love.

Barrett, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of several nonfiction books, is adept at the mechanics of the novel. His dialogue sounds spoken, the scenes pass by smoothly and at just the right clip. Occasionally the prose is too lavish: "The sofas and chairs lie in cool pools of watery shadow like velvet leviathans anesthetized." But such empurplings fade as the book proceeds on its quiet but genuinely moving path. In the end, The End of the Party seems a well-tended, well-annotated photo album, an example of loving nostalgia tempered by wisdom.

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