Black for Remembrance

Twenty years ago Caroline Webb's five-year-old daughter Hayley was kidnapped and murdered, her body decapitated and burned. The case was never solved. Caroline's second marriage, to a compassionate older man, and the birth of two children, Gregg, now 15, and Melinda, 8, have helped to ease her nightmares. This inventive and forceful psychological thriller traces the bizarre, terrifying events that convince Caroline that a new horror is emerging--Hayley has come back not only to seek revenge on her killer, but to murder her half-sister Melinda as well. She hears Hayley's voice calling to her in a shop; she sees ``Help me Mommy'' written in blood on the bathroom mirror. Caroline's husband seems only mildly concerned and the police are skeptical, but when three people with ties to the original kidnapping are murdered, one by one, detective Tom Jerome reopens the old case and finds that it was badly mishandled. First novelist Thompson controls a vigorous cast of increasingly puzzled and frightened characters, while astute detective work and even a hint of the occult keep the suspense level consistently high. (Jan.)