Say Hello to Our Woman Flint

By Paul Gray

Paul Eddy has spent 25 years as a journalist, both as a reporter for the London Sunday Times and as editor of that paper's much acclaimed Insight investigative team. He has also co-authored six nonfiction books with such titles as The Cocaine Wars and War in the Falklands. If truth is stranger than fiction, then Eddy has clearly witnessed firsthand a lot of strange stuff. Why then has he now decided to write fiction? Has he seen some things it would be prudent to disguise?

On the evidence of Flint (Putnam; 338 pages; $24.95), Eddy's first novel, everyone had better hope the answer is no. This slickly paced thriller postulates a conspiracy, called the Enterprise, between rogue elements in British and U.S. intelligence. These powerful, shadowy mavericks shake down high-rolling international crooks for big protection money and then use their law-enforcement connections to make sure the bad guys get away with their misdeeds. Which is how Grace Flint, on an undercover assignment from New Scotland Yard, gets her lovely face stomped in and many bones in her equally winning body broken during a blown operation in London.

Not since Modesty Blaise has spy literature seen a heroine as determined and spunky as Flint. Once she has recovered from her near death ordeal, she sets out to track down the villain who maimed her and stumbles ever deeper into the coils of the Enterprise. Eddy gives her a glamorous itinerary, including stops in the Caribbean, Paris, Amsterdam and Cyprus, and plenty of near escapes. Her adventures may be more diverting than credible, but Flint, who emerges from it all as a genuinely sympathetic and interesting character, looks as though she may have some pretty good commercial legs.

--P.G.