THE STONE COUNCIL

A flat-footed thriller about a mother’s quest to uncover the dark forces that threaten her adopted son.

Scarred and embittered after a violent sexual attack at the age of 14, ethnologist Diane Thiberge, now 30, flies to Ra-Nong, on the Burmese border, to adopt a son, Lu-Sian, who is six or seven, his uncertain origins making his age impossible to fix. The child comforts Diane, who, as the author clumsily puts it, has “a phobia of flesh.” Back home in Paris, mother and son suffer a violent auto accident that leaves Lu-Sian brain-dead. Or so doctors say. Then a white-haired, seven-foot tall stranger, Rolf van Kaen, appears at the boy’s bedside, insisting that he can and must heal the child. Van Kaen’s ministrations appear to work. But before Diane gleans insight into his methods and motivations, he is brutally murdered. Compelled to follow his trail, she consults several sources, virtually all of them one-dimensional. From their evidence, she draws deductions swiftly and methodically, robbing the narrative equally of momentum and suspense. Lu-Sian, she learns, was one of several children known as the Watchers: children born in Mongolia capable of paranormal communication. And now, eager to seize their powers, a group of men is racing to the lab in Mongolia (described as blandly as the other locales here) where the children had been studied. Hoping to head them off, Diane realizes that she faces discoveries challenging her trust in conventional, rational observation. The reader, on the other hand, faces a denouement challenging the most generous suspension of disbelief, an ending that may well provoke more snickers than gasps.

No paranoia here. Unlike Ira Levin in Rosemary’s Baby or Richard Condon in The Manchurian Candidate, Grangé (Flight of the Storks, 2001, etc.) fails to create a shadowy world that can make unbelievers believe.