BLACK is a conspiracy thriller in which the perps, and even the Machiavellian intent, aren't immediately obvious. As a matter of fact, the reader doesn't have a glimmer of understanding until page 327 of 362. Until then, four subplots proceed on more or less separate paths. One must have faith that they eventually coalesce.

Jordan Mitchell is CEO of Borders Atlantic, a communications company on the verge of marketing a system for cellular phone message encryption that will stymie even the electronic eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency.

Senator Elizabeth Beechum chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Fearing Mitchell's new technology will give terrorists the upper hand, she's determined to stop it cold. Beechum is also likely to be the nominee for president to come out of the Democratic National Convention being held in a couple weeks. Unfortunately, she gets derailed when she's attacked by an unknown assailant and rendered unconscious in her Georgetown home. When she comes to, the room is awash in blood - not hers. Though there's no body, circumstantial evidence leads her to be charged with murder.

Jeremy Waller is the FNG on the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team, assigned as a sniper. After a successful first mission in Puerto Rico to free the kidnapped daughter of the island's governor, Waller finds himself seconded to a mysterious two-man operation in Yemen so hush-hush that even his HRT bosses don't know about it. What's the FBI doing in an overseas gig, anyway?

Sirad Malneaux, a fast-rising executive in Borders Atlantic, finds herself hand-picked by Mitchell, apparently on the basis of her ability to convincingly lie, for an important assignment. Does he know she really works for the CIA?

Then, to make things interesting, an obscure American techno-firm has devised a new way to kill - with concentrated sounds waves that blow out the victim's skull. (In the movie version, wouldn't that make a great special effect?)

The twist to the story, revealed in the last thirty-five pages, should be clever enough to lift BLACK above standard fare. But that's counter-balanced by two-dimensional main characters, none of whom I particularly cared about. To be fair, author Christopher Whitcomb faced a dilemma in the evolution of his plot. By the story's end, the reader realizes why he couldn't demonize any one of his players. Yet, in order to keep the reader guessing, he couldn't make any one of them too sympathetic. After all, there has to be both a Protagonist and Antagonist in any story, right? Perhaps only Beechum is blameless from the start. (But is any politician truly innocent in the mind of the Body Politic?)

Since BLACK was a birthday gift, I wanted to like it more than I do, and I feel guilty that I don't.