There's nothing particularly subtle or intricate about J. Gregory Smith's competent new novel, "A Noble Cause." It's a straightforward modern thriller, unburdened by complexity. With the exception of one secondary character, all of the principals and secondaries who toil in Smith's story are either plainly good, or plainly bad, and none of them are very deep. Smith's settings won't take readers anywhere they've not visited before courtesy of dozens of other novelists in scores of other novels. Still, Smith writes fairly snappy and realistic dialogue, his points of view are consistent, and he paces this novel well enough to keep the pages turning. It's a solid thriller, written with skill sufficient to hold readers' attention and keep them entertained.

In the aftermath of his girlfriend's Antiguan disappearance and the murders of his parents in Pennsylvania, Mark Noble battles to uncover the reasons and people behind the mysterious kidnapping and deaths. The plot rushes along a track centered around clandestine mind control experiments conducted on unwitting subjects via pharmaceutically-enhanced hypnosis. Accordingly, the back-cover copy of Smith's book likens "A Noble Cause" to Richard Condon's famous 1959 novel, "The Manchurian Candidate." In that the latter was as much socio-political Cold War commentary as thriller, while Smith's work has no such grand political or philosophical ambitions, the comparison is at best a stretch. Nonetheless, "A Noble cause" is a rewarding read, and a good way to while away a few hours. ( )