Crime thrillers offer flash and substance

For slick testosterone-driven action, the pseudonymous Crow is, as they now say of excellent professional ballplayers, ''nice." His serial hero Ewing's, uh, batting average is impressive: In various wars and mercenary actions, the sometime Baltimore narcotics detective has smoked Bosnian snipers, dispatched Iraqi regulars, blown away Russian operatives. On the job, he's a man against all people, a fine-tuned, ecumenical killing machine.

In the new book, after Ewing is suspended from the narcotics squad, he picks up a freelance CIA job as security for a South Korean CEO closing a clandestine deal with two rogue Russian generals. Don't ask -- suffice it to say that this complicated exchange has grave international implications and that only the coolest, hardest players get to join the action.

Never mind that as much of the plot is foreplay as it is consummation: Ewing's elaborate secret training in a Washington, D.C., safe house occupies virtually half the book. But it's entertaining watching him honed to needle sharpness by the three fetching, accomplished women responsible for teaching him Korean, toning up his Russian, and retooling his killing skills. Really the only place Crow falters markedly is with his dopey litanies of all the luxe furniture, haberdashery, cars, and lethal hardware that overimpress Ewing (or is it Crow himself?) wherever the globe-trotting novel goes. Ewing is deep into coffee: ''Fresh-brewed, dark and powerful: Tastes like Sulawesi or New Caledonian."

Otherwise, the writing is as nimbly brisk as the second half of the story's violence-and-sex- soaked intrigue in places as far-flung as Big Sur, Pusan, and Vladivostok. Ewing (half Vietnamese, half African-American, but lacking almost any aura of ethnicity) is a kind of 21st-century James Bond, cooler and crueler than the original, and the book is a Bondish fantasy, smooth as cream, reliably entertaining, and, despite some posturing introspection, soulless.