Quayle Force

Marilyn Quayle is an underused national asset. Ever since her husband became vice president, scarcely a month has passed without some revelation about how she has set his agenda, managed his career, and positioned him for glory. This full-time Svengali is also a trained lawyer and the mother of three children. Most women in her shoes would not be giving off a strong aura of repressed energy, but Mrs. Quayle constantly looks as if she were itching to run Chrysler, on alternate Tuesdays.

Since the Chrysler slot is taken, and since the powers that be were unenthusiastic about having the Second Lady in her husband's old Senate seat, Mrs. Quayle has worked off some of that excess steam by shuttling from hurricane to earthquake—and by co-writing with her sister Nancy Northcott a fast-paced thriller about the death of Castro. Like many books in this genre, Embrace the Serpent (Crown) has a feverish geopolitical premise. With their union and their economy in shreds, those pesky Russians are still playing expansionist games in Cuba, but now they're in the pay of a new global superthreat: the Arabs. Bob Grant, a conservative young senator, is virtually the only man in Washington smart enough to see the danger to his country's national security and reach out to the freedom fighters struggling to liberate the island. One turns the pages as much for the scathing portraits of stupid and decadent liberals—the press is duped by the Russians, the Democratic president snookered by the media—as to find out if the hero will succeed in his eleventh-hour bid to save the hemisphere.

ELISE O'SHAUGHNESSY