MESMERIZED

Lynds (Mosaic, 1998), once a think-tank editor with a Top Secret security clearance and lately the co-author who tamed Robert Ludlum’s bloodlust for !!!s in The Hades Factor, stirs furiously at her latest thriller, abandons earlier thrusts at the CIA, and spins a plot device familiar from the Minnie Driver heartwarmer Return to Me, in which Minnie’s heart transplant comes from her lover’s dead wife. Here hard-driving Washington lawyer Beth Convey dies, gets an anonymous heart, then finds herself beset, indeed spellbound by vile images springing from the heart’s former owner, and then sinks into a mire of ex-KGB agents. What dreams may come with a new mortal coil must give us pause, though Lynds suggests it’s not over about Beth’s cellular memory.