Price dr david audley 17 A New Kind of War

Set mainly among a group of British Army officers in Germany in August 1945, this new thriller by the author of The Labyrinth Maker exemplifies the truism about war: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Capt. Fred Fattorini of the Royal Engineers, member of a powerful British banking family, wonders why a small English detail breaks the civil war truce in Greece in February 1945. He doesn't find out until he's assigned to that same special unit, called TRR-2, in occupied Germany. Fattorini remains obsessed with the incident, trying to ferret out the truthfrom his ''mad'' colonel, various fellow majors (his own promotion is a mystery to him) and the boyish, loquacious Capt. Audley. Only after an exercize in lifting a German DP scientist, in which the British double-cross the Americans, does Fattorini discover what is really going on: a British attempt to co-opt high-level German scientists from under the noses of the Russians and uncover a Russian operative in their midst. There are hints of Evelyn Waugh's wartime trilogy and definite tendencies toward Anthony Powell's obliqueness in his A Dance to the Music of Time series. But obliqueness here becomes annoyingly talky, and the tone of anguished cynicism seems stagey. This is not Price's best effort.