A thriller with a promising premise — a wife calls her husband for help after she kills a man — but the facts were doled out so sparingly that I was more impatient than curious to find out the whole story. And it was written with a series of cliffhangers that would have worked fine if it was published as a series of magazine installments but fell flat in a novel. Ultimately, none of the people in the book, good or evil, seemed to have much in the way of redeeming or even interesting characteristics, and the plot got increasingly absurd as the book went on until it finally spent itself in exhaustion and sputtered to an end. ( )