SECRET RAGE

Harris follows up her mildly attractive debut (Sweet and Deadly) with a story of rape—told by victim Nickie Callahan, a Southern beauty back home in Knolls, Tennessee, after a few successful years as a New York model. Nickie is now sharing a house with twice-divorced Mimi Houghton, an old school chum; she's falling in love with Mimi's brother Cully, taking classes at Houghton College, But her new life is shadowed by a series of local attacks by an unidentified rapist: Nickie's faculty advisor Dr. Barbara Tucker is the second victim; the assault on Nickie herself soon follows. And the women eventually realize that the rapist must be someone known to them—though their efforts to track him down aren't too successful: a murder ensues before the culprit trips himself up. Sensitive as a chronicle of the rape victim's feelings of fury and impotence, with Nickie an appealing heroine—but lacking in edge, focus, and tension as mystery/suspense.