Overview
Jane “Jinx” Kingsley, fashion photographer and daughter of a ruthless millionaire, lies in an expensive private clinic, apparently the luckless survivor of a suicide attempt. When she emerges from her coma, Jinx can remember nothing of recent days: not that her financé, Leo Wallander, has jilted her and run off with her best friend, nor that she made another suicide attempt just a few days earlier. Then the memories begin to surface – memories of utter desperation and terror.But Jinx has lost her memory, not her mind. She knows she would never try to kill herself over Leo, and she’s just as sure that she was never jilted. With the help of the clinic’s director, Dr. Alan Protheroe, Jinx tries to remember what happened that was so horrifying her mind now refuses to recall it. While the police investigate, Jinx faces the worst nightmares of her life – the truth about what happened.
In this intensely suspenseful novel, nothing is as it first seems, nor even as it subsequently appears. And the answers to the mysteries lie not in the details of forensic evidence, but in the dark, passionate recesses of the mind.
From the Hardcover edition.
Suffering from posttraumatic amnesia, a respected fashion director and millionaire's daughter is placed in an exclusive private clinic after she is involved in a mysterious car accident. She soon begins to recover, but her memories are filled with desperation and absolute terror. A spellbinding tale of psychological suspense from the Edgar-winning author of The Sculptress.
Synopsis
In this acclaimed psychological mystery, Jinx Kingsley, a prominent photographer and millionaire’s daughter, wakes up in an exclusive hospital suffering from amnesia. Not only can she not remember the car accident that caused her memory loss, but she doesn’t remember that her impending wedding has been called off or that her former fiancé and his girlfriend have been brutally murdered in the same way her first husband had been ten years before. Now she must try to piece together her memories in order to determine her innocence. With deft psychological explorations and shocking twists, Walters brings the story to an awe-inspiring conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
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 fianc 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.)