TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER The Bookworm Sez Advertisement

The perfect place to hide was never in the broom closet.

When you were a kid playing hide and seek, you knew better than to hunker down in a place that was easy to find. Everybody, including you, went for the perfect hiding spot until it was safe to sneak past "it" and run "home".

Some people never outgrow their love of hide and seek. For some, though, that old children's pastime is no game -- it's a matter of life or death.

In the new true-crime book, "Armed & Dangerous" by William Queen and Douglas Century, you'll read about a daring and ultra-risky mission to capture one of America's most violent modern criminals.

Queen grew up in a household with a lawman, so it was natural for him to look upon crime-fighting as a someday profession.

After high school, Queen went to Vietnam, where he learned to think like the enemy, practice surveillance techniques, and keep cool under pressure. When he got out of the Army, he became a policeman in North Carolina.

But that wasn't enough for a former Special Forces soldier and part-time NASCAR racer. Bill's father was an ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) agent, so it seemed like a natural career choice. He wanted to "put the hard-core bad guys in jail".

This book is about one of those bad guys.

In the mid-1980s, people in several communities around Southern California were terrorized by Mark Stephens, who was a drug trafficker, gun aficionado and violent bully.

Stephens, Queen says, was a sociopath who knew he had homicidal tendencies and -- for whatever reason -- holed himself up in the San Bernardino Mountains. Stephens only came down from his mountaintop camp occasionally. When he did, he intimidated everyone with whom he came into contact.

Despite their desperate efforts to catch him, Stephens eluded local police for months.

Queen lobbied his supervisors for permission to go on Stephens' own turf to snag the criminal. Finally, approval was granted and Queen hand-picked his team. The hide and seek game-to-end-all-games began.

Do crime shows and detective novels make your pulse race and your hands sweaty? Then take a deep, calming breath before you read "Armed & Dangerous" because authors Queen and Century are going to take you on a hunt for a criminal whose brutality will stun you.

Eventually they will, anyhow.

Much of the first part of this book is biography, braggadocio, and Queen's begging to be allowed to hunt for Stephens in the renegade way for which Queen has become famous. There are occasional fits of what true-crime fans want in a book (fast-paced crime-fighting) but it's not until Queen actually starts the hunt that the book picks up for good and becomes great.

If you're willing to crawl through a few dozen pages of boasting and you don't mind some side-trips before you get to the heart of the hunt, then this is a book to find. If you want your thrills faster, though, hide your wallet and seek something else.

"Armed & Dangerous" by William Queen and Douglas Century, Random House, $23.95, 225 pages.