REVIEWS: 'Kill the Father,' by Sandrone Dazieri, and 'Ike and McCarthy,' by David Nichols

By Sandrone Dazieri. (Scribner, 512 pages, $28.)

In "Kill the Father," two people haunted by their own demons team up to solve a baffling crime — one that already appears to be solved. When a woman is beheaded in a park near Rome and her 6-year-old son disappears, the police are sure the woman's husband is to blame.

But in "Kill the Father," the American debut by Italian writer Sandrone Dazieri, things are far more complex and sinister than even that. The chief of Rome's major crimes unit turns to an unlikely duo: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli — still on leave after surviving a bloody bombing — and Dante Torre, who survived worse, a childhood held captive in grain silo.

When Torre and Caselli discover that the boy's disappearance might be linked to Torre's own ordeal, the complex thriller motors off with plenty of momentum.

"Kill the Father" is the first in a planned series featuring Caselli and Torre, two fascinating characters I'd like to hear more from. Although this book had a few twists too many, straining the bounds of possibility to the breaking point at its conclusion, the Caselli and Torre series shows promise.

COLLEEN KELLY

By David A. Nichols. (Simon & Schuster, 385 pages, $27.95.)

While fellow Republican Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont and CBS' Edward R. Murrow courageously criticized and exposed McCarthy even when his popularity was high, Eisenhower only expressed vague disagreement with the Wisconsin senator's tactics.

But in "Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower's Secret Campaign Against Joseph McCarthy," author David A. Nichols details the president's hidden hand in bringing down the senator.

Though his case is buttressed with too many "likelies" and "probablies" regarding Ike's actions, Nichols nevertheless builds a case that Eisenhower approved compiling a report detailing efforts by McCarthy and his aide Roy Cohn to get preferential treatment from the Army for Private G. David Schine, a consultant to McCarthy's subcommittee and Cohn's friend (and rumored lover, though that was never proved).

The administration's sly handover of that report to several senators was intended to undermine McCarthy, and indeed it did. It led to the Army-McCarthy hearings that unmasked McCarthy once and for all, the highlight of which was the searing put-down by the Army's lawyer Joseph Welch, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

DENNIS J. MCGRATH