"The Key to Rebecca" is an assured best seller even before publication, with a first printing of 100,000 copies, a major subsidiary success with sales to the leading book clubs, a serialization smash with rights sold to just about every publication this side of Presbyterian Life, and a perfectly dreadful novel. I suppose it says something about American tastes in popular fiction but I don't like to think what. Mr. Follett's first novel, "The Eye of the Needle," got by on a pass, but this one should have a bell tied to it before being let out on the streets.

The story could have been a good one. It is a fictionalized account of the famous Kondor mission, a German espionage operation set up in Cairo during the desert campaigns of 1942. The true story has the elements of an outstanding adventure novel…. Mr. Follett's ability to lift all of...