London lawyer Eleanor Porter, who has a new job eliminating legal liabilities from tabloid stories, works at One Canada Square, a modern but haunted building that adds to the sense of danger in this smoothly written stand-alone novel of suspense from British author Spring (In the Midnight Hour
). When Ellie leaves work, she feels as if she is being watched. Indeed, Ellie is being stalked, and the death 20 years earlier of her father is somehow tied in. Ellie was eight at the time, and guilt and tiny details rush at her periodically as the tension builds. Ellie's self-centered mother, Annabel, gives little help, and Ellie's young neighbor, Jessica Barnes, and Jessica's thug boyfriend, Tull, lend a different kind of tension to Ellie's daily life. The world of Carl Hewitt, Ellie's stalker, however, is drawn haphazardly, and his wife, Denise, is oddly inconsistent. While the forced plot can be irritating, and some of the misdirection that allows a tidy ending is cheap, thriller fans who like a rich London setting will be rewarded. (Nov.)
