'No reader who opens the book is likely to put it down for long for its grip cannot be resisted.' ADELAIDE REVIEW The newspapers reported the case with relish. When Jane 'Jinx' Kingsley, daughter of a ruthless millionaire, emerges from a coma, she remembers nothing of the last few days. Not that she's been jilted by her fiance, Leo, and betrayed by her best friend, Meg, nor her own supposed suicide attempt. Then the memories begin to surface - memories of utter desperation and absolute terror. With the disappearance of Leo and Meg, the police seem determined to trap her into an admission of murder. While they investigate, Jinx faces the worst nightmare of her life - confronting her memories and unravelling the truth.

Reviews

Award-winning author Walters (The Scold's Bridle, LJ 10/1/94) has another hit in this riveting, intricately woven tale of murder, jealousy, and sexual obsession. Photographer Jinx Kingsley, the adored daughter of millionaire Adam Kingsley, suffers a concussion and amnesia after an apparent suicide attempt, presumably because her fiancé left her for her best friend just weeks before the wedding. But little is what it seems at first, as police learn after finding the bludgeoned bodies of Jinx's fiancé and friend, then reexamining the ten-year-old unsolved murder of Jinx's husband, who also was bludgeoned to death. As the investigation reveals tangled sexual relationships and severely dysfunctional families, police focus on Jinx, and a cat-and-mouse game is played out to a shocking conclusion. Walters sets a new standard for British mysteries, with her fine characterizations and intelligent prose; she has a winner here.-Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.

British suspense writer Walters, each of whose previous books (The Ice House, The Sculptress and The Scold's Bridle) has won an award, now has a new publisher and a big promotional push behind her. Unfortunately, the new book is her weakest to date‘overplotted and rather unconvincing. It rests on an interesting premise, however: its heroine, Jinx Kingsley, who has been found drunk and disoriented on an abandoned airfield in Wiltshire after apparently trying to kill herself by wrecking her car, is suspected of several murders‘but can't, after her accident, remember anything that happened for several vital days. Her husband had been mysteriously killed some years before‘and now her fiancé and the girlfriend with whom he has been cheating on Jinx are missing. Can her powerful millionaire father be involved? And what about the man who is savagely attacking prostitutes in the area? As Jinx tries, in a local clinic run by sympathetic Dr. Alan Protheroe, to recover her memory and exorcise dark terrors hovering at the edge of her mind, several well-observed police investigators dig out fragments of her story. But that story is so complicated, and filled with such a welter of walk-on characters, many of them ultimately insignificant, that the reader loses patience. Jinx herself is not made sufficiently sympathetic to win interest, her growing affection for Dr. Protheroe seems half-hearted and the ultimate murderer, when finally unmasked, comes right out of left field. Walters is highly talented, but perhaps she is working too fast. 75,000 first printing; major ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection. (Mar.)