A Case of Creepiness Interrupted

The creepy stuff begins immediately in Catherine Coulter’s latest suspense novel (following “The Cove,” “The Maze” and “The Target”). FBI agent Ford MacDougal, injured by a terrorist car bomb in Tunisia, is convalescing in a Maryland hospital when he dreams about his sister, Jilly, being hit by a wall of water and blacking out. It’s more than a dream, because Ford feels he has become Jilly. It’s like telepathy.

A cross-country phone call to Edgerton, Ore. (known to residents as “the Edge”), confirms the psychic connection: Jilly has driven her Porsche off a cliff into the ocean. Rescued by a passing highway patrolman, she is in a coma. Meanwhile, in a prologue from Jilly’s point of view, we see her being driven mad by a voice in her head--the voice of someone named Laura who had “betrayed” her.

Ford, still gimpy, checks out of the hospital and flies to Oregon to see Jilly. Instead of answers, though, he finds more mysteries. Jilly’s husband and fellow pharmaceutical researcher, Paul Bartlett, admits to having an affair with Laura Scott, whom he describes as a mousy librarian in Salem. Ford tracks her down and finds her anything but mousy--in fact, he falls in love with her. Laura denies sleeping with Paul. Then it turns out she isn’t a librarian at all, but an undercover federal narcotics agent. Somebody tries to poison Laura and Ford and then shoot them.

Back in Edgerton, Charlie Duck, a retired cop, is murdered. This agitates the village’s two power centers--a citizens group and the household of wealthy Alyssum Tarcher, who has been financing Jilly and Paul’s work on a “memory drug” to treat trauma victims. Tarcher’s son, Cotter, is a thug. His daughter, Cal, alternates between frumpiness and nymphomania. Indeed, impulsive sexual acting-out seems epidemic in the Edge. Ford is only beginning to investigate all this when Jilly recovers from the coma and promptly vanishes.

So far, so good. The story has been full of surprises, but they have been the sort of surprises we expect in this genre. Coulter has manipulated us, but in ways her fans no doubt enjoy. (Ford, for example, is not only strong, brave and handsome, but a sensitive guy who loves flowers and pays attention to clothes and decor.) What happens next, however, is genuinely peculiar.

Ask yourself: Would Stephen King create a town in Maine or Dean Koontz a hamlet in California, people it with eccentric characters, isolate it from the outside world, lay on the atmosphere (the Edge has a cemetery where, Cal Tarcher says, “sometimes you can see odd shadows . . . hear things, soft-sounding things. The trees whisper to each other. . . . The hemlocks always seem to be crowding in toward the graves. You can imagine that their roots are twisted around some of the older caskets, maybe cracking them open, maybe releasing. . . .”), and then go off and leave it?

Coulter does.

Ford has hardly called in two FBI buddies, Dillon and Lacy Savich, to help protect Laura in a cliff-side cottage in the Edge when they are all gassed with something called “ice acid,” kidnapped, flown to Central America, and, for the amusement of their captors, injected with Paul and Jilly’s experimental drug, which has proven to be a potent aphrodisiac.

The creepy stuff is replaced by slam-bang heroism and survival in the rain forest, the cast of Edgerton villains by an army of nameless narcotraficantes. It’s as if Coulter ran out of ideas for the Oregon coast and started a second novel halfway through the first one. We, however, see plenty of unexplored possibilities in the Edge and wish Coulter hadn’t turned away from them for so long, returning only for a hurried wrap-up at the end and that last-ditch expedient of the novelist, the posthumous letter that explains all.

The story has been full

of surprises, but they

have been the sort of

surprises we expect in this

genre. [Catherine] Coulter

has manipulated us,

but in ways her fans

no doubt enjoy.