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Interpersonal relationships are at the heart of this involving mystery about a Boston psychiatrist whose patients are taxing her intellectual and physical stamina to the limit, and whose friends and lover may be pushing it even farther. Carla is a beautiful woman with a runner’s physique, a well-furnished mind, and even a bit of extrasensory perception. She needs those attributes firing on all cylinders when she finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery and an escalating search for hidden scientific information that could play havoc with the very weather of the world.
Author Jackson does a first-rate job of keeping her story moving at a rapid pace even as she plows the shifting ground of Carla’s associations with the key people around her. Is the new man in her life what he says he is, or can he really be trusted? Has her ex-fiancé simply become a very good friend, or does he still cling to romantic hope? Can one patient have committed parricide and another the brutal torture and death of an associate? And what of her good friend and neighbor? Was her untimely death an accident or murder?
Jackson is a skilled writer, able to plumb inner turmoil with the same degree of intensity that she exhibits when building suspenseful moments. While aspects of her plot may stretch environmental credibility a bit, the behavior and motivation of her characters feel authentic and real. The potential duality inherent in her key players (Are they what they seem, or are they masking their real intent?) is what makes this solid mystery not only mentally engaging but fun to read.