THE SEDUCTION

As the curtain rises, Lee Montara and her sister Rosie Cooper are trading stories about their childhood as they wait, armed with a pistol, in Rosie's Taconic Hills farmhouse for the man who's been terrorizing them. A series of long flashbacks shows Lee, a photo editor for City, switching her vacation destination from Cozumel to Taconic Hills to avoid megalomaniac photographer Stewart McClaren; the arrival of a series of sinister gifts—a bouquet of rotting yarrow leaves, a layer cake, six candles, a bunch of blood-filled balloons- -each tied with black satin ribbon; and the discovery that even though he's followed her to Taconic Hills, McClaren can't be the sender of these unwelcome presents, because he's been strangled.... Far less inspired than So Shall You Reap (1992), Wallace's last outing in Taconic Hills, though it presents an ingenious motive for mischief that may well be unique in the annals of crime fiction.