Strange Bedfellows

The mind-reading federal employees who made their first appearance in The Sensitives (1987) return to guard Mikhail Gorbachev on a visit to New York City. (Burkholz also wrote The Snow Gods, 1985, and collaborated on The Sleeping Spy, 1982, with Clifford Irving.) Fortunately for the rest of the nation, this gang of extrasensitive Americans, young men and women with the ability to read everything you've ever stored in your mind, continue to work for Intelligence rather than for the Internal Revenue Service. Their current assignment is the safekeeping of the General Secretary of the USSR, on his way to the US to make a historic joint appearance at the U.N. with our own president. He'll be bringing his own squad of mind-readers, who will be busy reading threatening American thoughts and, at the same time, throwing up a psychic privacy screen around the boss who is willing to extend glasnost only so far. But the psychic shield is not enough to stop a thoughtless bullet from an American officer who slips through the bodyguards. And none of the mind-readers is in a position to pick the brain of the high-level Russian who slips guiltily away from the scene of the shooting when he sees that Gorbachev's Kevlar vest has saved him. The frustrated Soviet and American psychics team up to track the traitors from Manhattan to Little Odessa. An entertaining and fast-moving thriller - with special effects that are more amusing than distracting. (Kirkus Reviews)