cover image Glory

Glory

Jack Curtis. Dutton Books, $18.95 (358pp) ISBN 978-0-525-24668-8

In this generally diverting British thriller, an ex-cop's hunt for a psychopathic killer spins off into a complicated investigation of a conspiracy reminiscent of Iran/contragate. Katherine Lorimer believes herself alone in her London flat as she's preparing her bath, but she's wrong. A man who, for some mysterious reason, she cannot see (she's not blind; the reader later learns the secret of his ``invisibility'') takes erotic pleasure in watching her bathe, then drowning her. Kate's roommate, Laura Scott, turns to former policeman John Deacon, the husband of her late friend Maggie, for help. Deacon pulls himself out of mourning for his wife as the killer strikes again and again. The trail leads to the computer terminals of a major bank, London's black ghetto, a Central American country in the midst of civil war and eventually to the office of a powerful conglomerate based in New York. Curtis (Crow's Parliament) sometimes settles for genre stock events rather than inventing fresh and intriguing situations. He explains his killer's madness in too pat a fashion, for example, and he fails to make him truly terrifying. Still, the action keeps rolling briskly and the reader keeps guessing nearly to the end. 50,000 copy first printing; $50,000 ad/promo. (August)