Steve Englehart was one of the most widely recognized comic book writers of the 1970s, with memorable runs on books ranging from Batman to The Avengers. In 1981, he published his first novel: The Point Man was the story of Max August, a Vietnam veteran turned rock 'n' roll DJ who unwittingly stumbled into a Cold War occult conspiracy and was recruited to fight for the good guys--after which the character disappeared for nearly three decades. When Englehart finally returned to the series with The Long Man (2010), he fixed things so that Max had acquired so much magical knowledge that he'd become functionally immortal back in 1985--a man in his late 50s with the body of a 35-year-old.
The Plain Man picks up the story of Max's battle against a right-wing cabal called the FRC in the summer of 2009. He's tracked two of its leaders, who are conducting an illicit romance, to a Burning Man-like festival in the Nevada desert, and is determined to turn at least one of them into a double agent. A conspiracy with nine co-directors, however, is bound to have competing agendas, and the novel's perspective constantly shifts, following up on hints dropped in The Long Man and adding a few more narrative threads for good measure.
The basic setup is easy enough to keep track of, and Englehart never takes his hand off the throttle, essentially turning Max's war with the FRC into the mystical equivalent of James Bond vs. SMERSH, complete with a plot to set off a nuclear bomb in the Yucca Mountains. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com