MOSAIC

A hodgepodge of a thriller about secret government experiments aimed at turning Multiple Personality Disorder into a positive. Major Roger Grayson is terrific at going undercover to penetrate noxious organizations. Among other sociopathic roles, he’s played the vicious redneck and the ruthless neo-Nazi to great disruptive advantage. But now he’s called upon to accept a sea change of an assignment: helping evaluate the mysterious effort overseen by pop psychologist Norman Zales at Belfair, a sort of gothic hideaway for MPDs. If the government-sanctioned experiments taking place there prove out, the nation will be able to field an enhanced breed of espionage agent. Consider: an agent is captured. She (virtually all MPDs are female) proceeds to frustrate the daylights out of her interrogators by a nifty shift of personality . . . Mata Hari into Orphan Annie, for instance. Or so goes the theory. Grayson is skeptical. He’s also not sure he qualifies as the right person to do the evaluating. Nor does he understand why it’s so important to the general, his boss, that he take the job. And when he begins to encounter bad guys, he’s puzzled by what they’re after. Grayson just can—t fathom what’s really going on at Belfair, or who’s being kept there. He’s sent to track down Susannah, a natural—that is to say, a multiple with push-button control over her contrasting cast of personalities—but he’s not sure why. And neither is the reader. But after the big, bloody finish, we do know that the survivors are the good guys. Since some of them may be MPDs, however, the difficulty lies in counting noses. You need a scorecard to tell the Emmas from the Veronicas from the Theresas, and so on. And a really strong commitment to want to do it. This capable veteran has done better (Haven, 1997, etc.).