FLEE THE ANGRY STRANGERS (480 pp.) George Mandel Bobbs-Merrill ($3.75).
To earn his literary bread & butter many a novelist from Defoe to Dostoevsky has turned to the news for a fiction plot. The best of them make enduring fiction out of passing fact by drawing deep on their imagination. In Flee the Angry Strangers, Novelist George Mandel has picked a headline subjectdrug addiction among teen-agersbut has given it little more than a gaping doubletake.
His heroine, Diane Lattimer, 18, has just broken out of a reformatory. She prides herself on being a...