In any world other than the one in which we live, the events in Phillip Margolin's latest novel would seem farfetched. Sadly, given the present political environment, his knotty plot is frighteningly plausible.

	"LOST LAKE" By Phillip Margolin HarperCollins ($25.95)

Twenty years ago in Lost Lake, Calif., a congressman who discovered sensitive material was killed in his bedroom.

Vanessa Wingate, the daughter of a general with political aspirations, was working for the congressman and witnessed the horrific event.

When, in a hysterical state, she insists to the local sheriff's deputy that a man named Carl Rice did it, her father has her committed to a mental institution.

Fast-forward to the present. Vanessa had hoped for a career in journalism, but her stay in the asylum destroyed her credibility. The best writing job she could find is for a sleazy supermarket tabloid.

Meanwhile, in Portland, Ore., struggling lawyer Ami Vergano meets an attractive cabinet maker named Dan Morelli and rents him an apartment over her garage.

When Morelli takes Ami's son to a Little League game, however, a fight breaks out and he winds up charged with attempted murder.

The incident makes the national news. When Vanessa sees Morelli's photo, she believes he is Rice.

By this time, her father is planning to run for president, and Vanessa begins to uncover an illegal covert operation in which Rice had worked for her father as a professional assassin.

Convinced that her father intends to kills her and Rice, she hires Ami as Morelli/Rice's attorney.

These are the elements of the novel, all set out for the reader to sift through early on. There's not much mystery. The eventual revelations are pretty obvious and easy to predict -- the main question being how the good guys are going to nail the evil general.

What makes this book a page turner is the way Margolin creates interesting, three-dimensional characters, and weaves his diverse plot lines so that every element becomes important to the denouement -- which is a little too happy to be convincing.

And then there's the nagging thought that horrific coverups of this kind are all too common in our military-industrial society.