SHADOW WALK

Twenty-three years ago Gordon Spangler executed his family of five—including his daughter Lara, Garner Quinn's best friend- -and then vanished, leaving behind a written confession and an unshakable conviction among the Spring Lake (N.J.) police that he was watching the funeral from the sidelines, and among his wife's family that he was haunting them, waiting his chance to pick them off as well. Now TJ Sterling, a true-crime writer several rungs below Garner (Graven Images, 1995) on the financial/ethical ladder, claims to have seen the invisible man—a mild-mannered sort devoted to house-restoration, board games, and the Lutheran Church—somewhere in Virginia. Go to the cops! Go to the FBI! Garner beseeches him, but TJ plans to use his secret knowledge, plus Garner's publishing contacts, to leverage himself back to the big time. ``Three weeks and you'll be reading about me in the papers,'' he assures her. And so she does, when he's found shot to death in his Charlottesville office with every indication of suicide. Can the footsteps of Gordon Spangler be far behind? And can Garner—drenched in her usual cocktail of guilt, nostalgia, and avenging determination—find Spangler before he finds her? Waterhouse writes with such breathtaking velocity that you'll finish reading—and in record time—before you realize how completely her string of surprises depends on coincidence piled on shameless coincidence.