Mongoose R.I.P. is an adventure-espionage novel in the tradition of Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming. But unlike Fleming's James Bond, Blackford Oakes is neither sexually promiscuous nor supplied with advanced technological gadgets. Blackford also differs from the heroes of Len Deighton and John le Carre, who suffer from a fundamental doubt about the moral superiority of the West over the East. Oakes, like Buckley himself, has no such moral qualms. He never denies that whatever the follies of the Western democracies (and in this novel they involve not only immoral but idiotic attacks on the life of a foreign leader), Communism's terrifying brutality and its disdain for human rights and dignity are far worse.

Buckley employs historical detail effectively, as an aid to characterization, and to make a plausible case for Cuban involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Buckley suggests...