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Robbin's seventh novel is an incredibly humorous and completely outlandish romp through the world of international intelligence. Switters is a young CIA agent who has a wacky old grandmother who breaks into his e-mail, and he has the hots for his nubile, much-too-young stepsister. As we join Switters, he is on his way to Peru for business purposes; when his grandmother hears of his intended destination, she persuades him to take her pet parrot back to the jungle to liberate him. Switters' almost-beyond-belief Peruvian adventures pale in comparison only beside what awaits him on his next assignment, in Syria. He's in the Middle East to run gas masks to the Kurds. But because of a curse put on him in the Amazonian jungle--a warning that if his feet ever touch the ground again, it will be curtains for him--he has confined himself to a wheelchair. So he gets to the Middle East and what does he do? He takes a sojourn in a convent full of defrocked nuns, whose abbess was the model for a Matisse painting of a nude that just happens to be in the possession of Switters' grandmother. He even gets involved in a touch-and-go struggle over a Vatican secret: the controversial third prophesy made to three peasant children by the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, the nature of which has been sealed in Vatican archives since then. The high jinks couldn't be any wilder here, but Switters is such a likable guy that the reader comes away envying his untamed life. --Brad Hooper

(Booklist/March 15, 2000)