Romeo

The principal male character in Title's first hardcover may be called Romeo, but that's about all he has in common with the male leads of the numerous paperback romances the author has written for Harlequin. This Romeo is a serial killer, one who tortures his upscale victims with S&M rituals before cutting out their hearts. Heroine Sarah Rosen has spent her young adulthood alienated from Melanie, her older sister, their relationship sundered by rivalry for the attentions of their father, a celebrated psychotherapist. But when Melanie-a psychiatrist working with the San Francisco police to catch Romeo-falls victim to the murderer, Sarah, a sexually repressed rehabilitation counselor, vows to bring the killer to justice. Not unexpectedly, the hunter quickly becomes the hunted as Romeo's maniacal blood lust focuses on the surviving sister. As the investigation progresses, Sarah, haunted by flashbacks of suppressed memories from her childhood, finds herself following a twisted path toward the truth and the revelation of Romeo's identity. The trail is overrun with a cast of stereotypical cops, TV personalities, drag queens and assorted psychotherapists and their sexually dysfunctional patients; soon enough, virtually every one of them becomes a suspect. The plot unwinds through breathless prose, and the pacing sometimes drags. Title, a former psychotherapist who worked in high-security prisons, brings some authority to her bizarre characters, however, and tosses in enough neurotic sex, chilly suspense and uplifting romance to carry the reader to her novel's gory, if somewhat anticlimactic, end. Major ad/promo. (Jan.)