FICTION

ANGEL EYES by Eric V. Lustbader (Fawcett Columbine: $19.95, 496 pp . ) . Let’s not be too harsh with Lustbader for birthing the Ninja craze of recent years--he simply invented the genre with a series of best-sellers (beginning, appropriately, with “The Ninja”) focusing on this exotic tradition of Oriental martial arts. His latest, “Angel Eyes,” is something of a departure since the protagonist is a woman, Tori Nunn, a former member of a hush-hush intelligence agency who is still grieving for her brother, lost years before in a joint American-Russian space project. Called back into service to help fight a worldwide influx of a new, particularly lethal form of cocaine, Tori finds herself embroiled in a wild, complex plot that goes far beyond mere cocaine into a global network of loyalties and treacheries. The glamorous Tori is every bit as skilled, and deadly, in the tricks of the Ninja as any of her predecessors, and sudden, violent, death lurks around every corner here.