Can a peace-loving pacifist from a tiny downstate New York Village named Greenwich find happiness in the middle of a mob of dedicated assassins? This is the question our hero, J. Eugene Raxford, asks himself while ducking bullets, bombs, karate chops and-ultimately — swords, in this latest exploit on the rollicking edge of suspense from the author of The Fugitive Pigeon and The Busy Body. The answer to J. Eugene’s question, both hilarious and scarifying, will keep you simultaneously on the edge of your seat and rolling in the aisles, and if you think that’s a tough trick, wait till you see our hero pouring evaporated milk on the microphone in his refrigerator, or taking orders from his watch (it talks to him in a tiny tinny voice), or traipsing off into low adventure and high comedy with Angela Ten Eyck, the beautiful if not brilliant peacenik daughter of the world’s most pugnacious munitions manufacturer. Dragooned by a typographical error into as daffy a league for the destruction of the world as the world has ever seen, our hero is as disheartened as the FBI to discover that he and he alone is in a position to end the nefarious doings — from the inside. Given a crash program in spy survival techniques, J. Eugene Raxford is thrust into the breach, where he would have preferred not to have been honored. His adventures and escapes, the intricacy of the plot as slowly he unravels it and it unravels him, and the ultimate triumph of very good Good over absolutely villainous Evil, all add up to either the season’s most terrifying comedy or funniest hair-raiser, or maybe both