IN THE DARK

Twenty years after fleeing in terror from the scene of her parents' murder in New York, actress Emily Silver attends the premiere of her first movie at a Los Angeles theater—and hears behind her the same whispering voice that drove her into hiding as a girl that night. When she tells her lover, trucker Mike Florio, what she's heard, he promises to have his friend Dev in New York look into it—then gets killed himself hours after he promises to reveal what Dev dug up. So it's back to New York for Emily, who'll find Dev without much trouble and will finally stand up to her tyrannical grandmother Gem, but she will be bedeviled by Gem's threatening housekeeper and chauffeur and rocked by sordid revelations (homosexuality, child abuse, and worse) about the family she thought she knew. Brennan (Full Commission, 1993; Headhunt, 1991) expertly balances sunshine and shadow as she shows why the demons from the past don't stand a chance against sprightly, gutsy Emily.