LOS ANGELES TIMES ARTICLE, FROM DATA BASE SEARCH. 'STAR WARS TWINS, SEPARATED AT BIRTH; REDEYE'

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Body:  PAGE    11
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 Copyright 1989 The Times Mirror Company
 Los Angeles Times
 March 12,  1989, Sunday, Home Edition
 SECTION: Book Review;      Page 10; Book Review Desk
 LENGTH:  908 words
 HEADLINE:  STAR WARS TWINS,  SEPARATED AT BIRTH;
 REDEYE BY RICHARD AELLEN  (DONALD I. FINE:  $18.95;  374 PP.)
 BYLINE:  By Harry Trimborn,  Trimborn is a member of The Times editorial staff.
 BODY:
 In
 his
 thriller,  "Redeye," Richard Aellen employs a familiar motif of low
 comedy
 and
 high drama -- the confusion and chaos, whether intended or not,
 caused
 by
 the activities of identical twins. And in doing so, Aellen raises once
 again
 the
 intriguing questions surrounding such siblings, who, in fiction, often
 serve
 to personify good and evil.
 Aellen's twins fit neatly into this well-worn mold. There is the good twin --
 Paul Stafford, the star investigative reporter for the Washington Herald. The
 evil twin is Kurt Alexander, a professional assassin for the
 Staatsicherheitsdienst, East Germany's equivalent of the KGB.
 They are the protagonists in this uneven work that reflects the latest turn
 in U.S.-Soviet relations and the dramatic changes taking place in the Soviet
 Union under Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The plot appears to have been inspired by
 former President Reagan's controversial conditional offer in 1983 to further
 world peace by providing Moscow with the secrets of "Star Wars" if the missile
 defense system is shown to be workable.
 Aellen's Soviet general secretary -- who is never named -- is preparing to
 leave for Washington to sign a treaty under which the United States and the
 Soviet Union will share secrets of their respective versions of "Star Wars."
 Soviet conservatives are opposed to the Kremlin reforms in general and to the
 treaty in particular. The far more sophisticated Soviet program, known as the
 Nevsky Project, has reached the operational stage, while its U.S. counterpart is
 still in the laboratories. So why, the conservatives ask, should Moscow exchange
 something proven workable for something that may never work? One of them,  former
 KGB chief, Gen. Alexander Ikhnovsky, enlists Kurt to make certain that the
 treaty is not signed by doing away with the Soviet leader in such a way that
 Americans will be blamed.
 To do that, Kurt is assigned to steal an obsolescent, but still effective,
 U.S. Redeye missile from a New Jersey warehouse to shoot down the general
 secretary's plane as it is about to touch down in Washington for the signing
 ceremony.
 The conservatives' scheme begins to unravel because of good twin Paul's
 nightmares. In them, he dreams,  in grisly detail, of killing various
 individuals. Upon awakening, Paul sets down the nightmares on paper, along with
 the names of his dream victims, and sends them to a magazine as works of
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 The CIA finds nothing make-believe about them, for the stories are detailed
 accounts of actual murders of CIA agents or CIA "assets." They believe Paul is
 the killer or at least an accomplice of the killer, who turns out to be Kurt.
 With great difficulty, Paul manages to convince CIA operatives of his innocence.
 He is helped by an attractive CIA "personnel specialist" who, fascinated by the
 special ties linking identical twins, provides the scientific jargon for Paul's
 clairvoyance that enables him to "see" what Kurt is, or has been, up to.
 Paul is placed under hypnosis to track the cause of his dreams. He mumbles
 the name of a depraved German "aunt" -- Tante Inge -- that leads to the
 discovery that he has a twin brother. Each Berlin-born twin believed the other
 had been killed in the devastation and post-war deprivation of the German
 capital. Their war-widowed mother mistakeningly thought Kurt had met a gruesome
 death through the terrible Tante.
 Paul and his mother, who is remarried to an American soldier, go to the
 United States where the good twin, blessed by the abundance and advantages of an
 American upbringing, grows into a sensitive, caring adult. Kurt, in the clutches
 of Tante Inge, remains in Berlin where he becomes a horribly abused sexual toy
 for Inge's male and female patrons. He grows into a brutal killer whose only
 loyalty is to his mentor, Gen. Ikhnovsky, who had launched him on his career as
 a state assassin. Ikhnovsky's given name became Kurt's surname.
 Kurt's only flashes of humanity occur when, driven by curiosity, he enters
 into Paul's world. But they are not enough to deter him from his mission. He
 laments the turn of fate that left him with Tante Inge, while his brother went
 off to the good life in America. Kurt even imagines he could have been the
 husband of the beautiful, dark-haired Joanna, whose marriage to Paul is
 disintegrating as a result of the accidental drowning of their only child. And
 he is eager to take Paul's place in Joanna's bed.
 It is Kurt's unprofessional and uncharacteristic detour into Paul's life that
 leads to the final confrontation.
 As a thriller, the book is off to a slow and halting start with too much
 emphasis devoted to Paul's marital problems. The space could have been put to
 better use by building suspense in several episodes in the middle section. It is
 only in the final pages that the suspense reaches satisfying intensity.
 Then, too, there is the business of Paul's nightmares. His insights through
 "telepathic communication" give Paul a great -- and in a way, unfair --
 advantage over his evil brother. Kurt possesses no such supernatural talents.
 Also, the use of clairvoyance is a cut-rate way of advancing the action. When
 Paul reaches a dead end in his frantic efforts to thwart his brother, a dream
 leads him out of it.
 Still, there are some nice twists to the plot.  "Redeye" is a pleasant enough
 entertainment for both thriller buffs and those who are into dreams and other
 mysteries of parapsychology.
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