THE ESCHER TWIST

He met her for less than an hour in the gallery on Huron Street. They spoke, looked at Escher prints, parted. But haunted by this fleeting contact and believing in love at first sight, crystallographer Leonard Sheldrake sets out to find the woman he last glimpsed leaving the gallery in her green coat. From the attic apartment he rents from Prof. Zachariah Winthrop’s widow Eloise, he ventures out on the streets of Cambridge. Eventually he finds the green coat for sale in a thrift shop. More important, he finds Homer and Mary Kelly (Murder at Monticello, 2001, etc.) looking at crystals in the Peabody Museum and recruits them in a search that unfolds like a crazy-quilt. Leonard discovers a videotape in the pocket of the coat that leads to a grave in the Mount Auburn cemetery. Mary visits her friend Barbara Strong in the Aberdeen Street Nursing Home and sees a man in a wheelchair fall to his death down a flight of stairs. Mrs. Winthrop sees a distraught mother visit her child’s grave. A geologist named Leonard Underdown falls to his death from the Mount Auburn cemetery tower. The Kellys go to City Hall and find the death certificate for Patrick Fell, an infant killed 12 years ago in a traffic accident. As each piece of the puzzle slides into place, it throws the others off-kilter. Worse still, the closer Leonard draws to the object of his search, the closer to danger he places himself and everyone around him.

Edgy fare from a reliable source.