Blind Instinct

With this seventh entry, Walker's series about FBI forensic pathologist Dr. Jessica Coran moves from original paperback to hardcover, presumably in a bid to absorb some of the Patricia Cornwell overflow. But turgid writing, heavy-handed atmospheric padding and a plot swollen with predictable turns would seem to seriously limit those aspirations. ""Each time I look on such evil, twisted, unconscionable and despicable acts perpetrated on a human being, I begin to believe that nothing might ever rival what I must deal with before me,"" laments Inspector Richard Sharpe of New Scotland Yard in an early--and typical--burst of tortured rhetoric. ""Yet... yet some fiend always finds a new twist, a new evil beyond anything you or I might ever have imagined possible, and this certainly proves the case here."" Toward the end of the year 2000, a religious cult in London has begun to kill people by the ancient and extremely uncomfortable method of crucifixion--possibly as a prelude to Christ's Second Coming. Dr. Coran, though busy in Virginia on a man ripped apart by rabid dogs, flies off to London to help Sharpe with his even more interesting case--thus giving Walker the chance to trot out numerous clich s about Anglo-American linguistic confusion. As the British body count rises to five, readers learn how to remove a human tongue and read a message branded on it, and meet an elderly priest/psychiatrist who talks like a cross between Yoda and the Exorcist. Coran, whose love life has taken a back seat to her work, manages to keep Inspector Sharpe's mind away from all the evil long enough to get him into the sack, before becoming a candidate for crucifixion herself. Anyone who stays around this long might begin to wish they'd waited for the paperback. (Mar.)