THE DARK ROOM

Fans who've followed Walters's meteoric rise (The Scold's Bridle, 1994, etc.) will find less Ruth Rendell than P.D. James in this tantalizing tale of Jinx Kingsley, who apparently greets the news that her fiancÇ Leo Wallader plans to leave her for her best friend Meg Harris by twice attempting suicide (auto exhaust, auto crash). Apparently, because Jinx, pulled from the wreckage of her car and sent to Dr. Alan Protheroe, at Salisbury's Nightingale clinic, by her father, rich, unsavory Adam Kingsley, doesn't remember a thing about the crash, or anything over the past nine days. Awfully convenient for her, sniff Supt. Frank Cheever and his minions, since Leo and Meg, missing ever since they decamped, were evidently murdered the same night as the crash—murdered in the same grisly fashion as Jinx's husband, Oxford don turned art-dealer Russell Landy, ten years ago. There's no doubt in Cheever's mind that either Jinx, not exactly a dewy-eyed victim, or her overprotective father could have killed her unfaithful men, both of whom had been carrying on with Meg. But then what of the rest of Jinx's monstrous family—her alcoholic stepmother, her two venal stepbrothers—or the peremptory voices that assure her, ``MEG WAS A WHORE!...My father made me evil''? Walters unfolds the dark complexities of Jinx's past with a master's hand, balancing sympathy and terror all the way to the introduction of a pivotal character on the very last page. (First printing of 75,000; $200,000 ad/promo budget; Literary Guild Main Selection)