Short Notices

THE GABRIEL HOUNDS by Mary Stewart. 320 pages. Mill-Morrow. $5.95.

As a writer of romantic thrillers, England's Mary Stewart, 51, has found a steady audience in the U.S.; her novels have regularly made the bestseller lists. The Gabriel Hounds ranks a cut below her earlier works, but it still offers her familiar, quick, neatly joined narrative and travel-poster background (Lebanon this time). There is also a crumbling castle for just the right touch of the gothic, and an anti-anti-hero who is restless, wealthy, athletic, loves poetry, and drives a white Porsche. With his help, the heroine invades the castle in search of an eccentric great-aunt and finds instead a dope-smuggling operation. The young lovers rout the criminals and head blissfully for the altar. Kismet.

VANISHED by Fletcher Knebel. 407 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

When Lawyer Stephen Greer--close friend and adviser to President Paul Roudebush--vanishes from the capital, the press and Washington officialdom suspect the worst. Is he in financial trouble? Has he fled the country to avoid exposure as a homosexual? If not, why did he spend so many nights in a certain apartment with a university professor? If President Roudebush knows the answer, he isn't talking--not even to Press Secretary Eugene Culligan, the narrator of this latest example of presidential pulp fiction.

The genre was launched a couple of decades ago by Upton Sinclair in his Lanny Budd novels and was developed with sharper expertise by Allen Drury with Advise and Consent and Fletcher Knebel with Night of Camp David and Seven Days in May. The success of such books depends on a measure of atmospheric authenticity to give readers the illusion that they are really being taken into White House bathrooms and Pentagon war rooms, and on suspense. Knebel, a former Washington reporter, is adept at providing both qualities, and therein lies the book's virtue.

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