For much of the way ["Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball"] is a clever and witty satire on the kind of electronic snooping and secret manipulation of people's lives that lies behind Watergate. A rather prim and prissy professor of experimental psychology finds himself forcibly recruited into a secret outfit called NESTER (New England Sensory Testing and Engineering Research)…. The madhouse atmosphere inside NESTER and the professor's growing rebellion are conveyed so expertly that when Mr. Spencer comes up with a final farfetched solution to the whole thing, and an explanation that falls pretty flat, the reader is all the more disappointed. (pp. 61-2)