A Storm of Spears

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovaonavich, 1971. CV5 - A first edition (stated with complete letterline) hardcover book in very good condition in very good dust jacket. Dust jacket has light discoloration, small bends on corners, and light shelf wear. Book has light discoloration, faint writing on front page, small bends on corners, and light shelf wear. A Novel of Suspense. Although not marked in any way, this copy comes from the personal collection of Otto Penzler, legendary editor and founder of the Mysterious Press, an award-winning icon in the genre. 8.25"x5.5", 183 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. This is the nightmarish story of a man hopelessly caught in a mad sequence of violent events and with no chance to save himself. It opens at a large California university and initially focuses on the drug-sex activist scene. It starts with infidelity and what appears to be an elaborate form of blackmail. Before it has reached far beyond blackmail. Frank Charles is an instructor in the university's English department. Since his return from duty with the Navy in Vietnam, he has been a close observer of the student activists; and he had taken part in one march on the Research Institute to protest the university's "part in the war". Nothing more. He played no role in the bomb threats, the riots, the rhetoric, the confrontations, the physical take-overs. His only impassioned activity has been his carnal involvement with Antonia, a twenty-year-old student activist with strong lusts and strange friends. Antonia turns Charles on with her undisguised, charged sexuality and makes him risk his marriage and his job to have her. But, as this narrative vividly describes, his last sexual encounter with Antonia is brutally interrupted- first with the blinding flare of flashbulbs, then with a savage beating, and finally with unconsciousness. When he comes to, hours later, alone, he find Antonia's sordid room splattered with blood. Not his. And then the phone calls start. If he wants to protect himself from implication in murder, to save his wife's life, and to hang on to his job, Charles must do what he is ordered by the people who have the photographs of him making love to Antonia. They are a bizarre group of weirdos trippers, revolutionaries. What they demand of him equally bizarre- but not nearly so wild as the dread truth of "White Knight" when Charles finally recognizes it. What he does then provides an explosive ending to a searing yarn.. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.