Polite Thriller

Maria, by Brian Cooper. 220 pp. New York: The Vanguard | Press. $3.00

Mr. Cooper’s first novel is a brisk but polite British thriller of the Palimpsest School, in which the hero suspects that things are not what they seem, and in each successive chapter deftly shucks off another layer of confused identities and misrepresented events until we finally have the harsh, human truth. Oedipus Rex set the pattern, though as his blurb writer justly suggests, Mr. Brian belongs in another class, with Helen MacInness and Ethel Vance.

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Robert Phelps

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Maria, by Brian Cooper. 220 pp. New York: The Vanguard | Press. $3.00

Mr. Cooper’s first novel is a brisk but polite British thriller of the Palimpsest School, in which the hero suspects that things are not what they seem, and in each successive chapter deftly shucks off another layer of confused identities and misrepresented events until we finally have the harsh, human truth. Oedipus Rex set the pattern, though as his blurb writer justly suggests, Mr. Brian belongs in another class, with Helen MacInness and Ethel Vance.