The satirical thriller, a beast so rare one can barely call it a genre, is one of storytelling's more difficult feats. In the last 30 years only one American writer -- that genius of derangement, Richard Condon -- has repeatedly brought the form alive. Now, in his new novel, "Wet Work," Christopher Buckley, with a pen misanthropically askew and venomously funny, reaches for the Condon mantle. How many writers can make us laugh out loud? Mr. Buckley does this every few pages. More important, whatever the debt he may owe to satirists before him, he is well on his way to inventing a brand of black comedy wholly his own.