DOUBLE BLIND

As if it weren't hard enough to rebound from divorce and hospitalization for the d.t.'s, Dr. Robert Snow is faced with an epidemic of schizophrenic men who all test positive for HIV. Whatever the connection is between the two illnesses, somebody doesn't want Snow to uncover it—and is willing first to attack him on a squash court and then to break into his apartment, beat him, rape Jennifer Kovach, the nurse he's been seeing, and inject them both with something that makes them psychotic. After Snow attacks the orderlies lurking around Jennifer's hospital bed, he has to go underground, with only Jennifer's friend, solicitous, unsettlingly homosexual Dr. Eddy Robinson, to help him—and when he loses touch with Eddy following a fight in a gay bar, Snow begins to disintegrate even as he closes in on the conspirators. Though he settles his intriguing epidemiological mystery all too soon, Dawson goes on to a compelling exploration of an area he staked out in Last Rights (1990)—the hero's attempt to hold onto his sanity despite the determined attacks of a medical establishment gone haywire.