Only the “Great Truths of Life,” headed up by seemingly spiritual Father Orion, involved not only the aforementioned crooks, thieves, and swindlers, but also, ironically, suicide. Well, the family isn’t buying it, the Blaine International Agency isn’t buying it, and neither is Mike, who takes great painstaking efforts to infiltrate the Great Truths of Life by flying to Chicago and back again with a cover story about amnesia that gains him admission to the compound, after which he must maintain his subterfuge and dignity in the flowing white robes the that passes for the dress code.
Meanwhile Trixie, typically, comes flouncing cavalierly in on her own by pulling a couple strings. In her right mind. And, thinks Mike, looking far lovelier in her robe. No time for that kind of thinking, though: Both Mike and Trixie will have to be single-mindedly levelheaded and lucid to get the lay of the land, and to surreptitiously detect the doings of the dough-raking con-men running the Great Truths of Life, and Father Orion who too disconcertingly espouses his omniscience, and the brainwashed and off-putting converts, “animals yapping with fanatical joy” as they’re being taught the “Great Truth.”
And, when Mike and Trixie's cover is blown — as these things inevitably happen — a balancing act of action ensues, with taut suspense increasing the tension, a myriad of reinforcements kicking up the chaos, guns out in full force and blazing and — for good measure and for the true mystics — reefer and hashish broken out, too, with Father Orion in refuge from the carnage, sitting cross-legged in a loin cloth like “an Oriental, holding the mouthpiece of a water pipe.” Elsewhere, Mike’s “seething anger suddenly wild and reckless” is ratcheted up a couple notches whenever Trixie is in trouble. And a self-sacrificing Gal Trixie is always hand-wringing over Mike.
These confrontations of criminal commotion don’t always wrap up prettily, but after a few bad buys are caught and some loose ends are tied, a little penultimate appraisal by Mike puts a few things in perspective: “Turn in a riot call and collar the whole bunch!” I panted. “It’s murder and torture, kidnapping, blackmail and God knows what. It’s big - and you’ll have to move fast to get everyone!”
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