COMPULSION

Wasting no time in preliminaries, Stewart (Belladonna, 1992, etc.) opens with mutilated model Cristina Parigi's frantic, fatal, very public plunge into the East River and then, within a few pages, shows her employer already erotically re-creating herself as Cristina. Why is Joanna Lefever—married to brilliant British psychologist Stephen Lefever, mother of budding beauty Bella, successful head of Designing Women, ridiculously wealthy by inheritance (much sumptuous detail about her Mercedes and the family charitable trust she heads)- -so desperately taken by the desire to masquerade as dead Cristina, taking her Upper West Side apartment and making herself over with clothes, scent, wigs? She thinks it's the commanding presence of Mephistophelian painter Louis van Nyman, whom she repeatedly follows out of receptions and into luxurious cars for quick, brutal, upscale sex. But as one of Stephen's new colleagues at Berkeley painstakingly explains to him—after the rift between Mr. and Ms. Right widens when his chair at Columbia fires him (making it clear that his visiting professorship has depended on the funding they've all counted on from his wife's trust)—she's so maddened by grief over the death of their baby Luke two years ago that she literally can't bear to be herself. Stephen (along with all but the dimmest of readers) already knows just how true that is, since Joanna can't forgive herself for cutting short Luke's agonized bout with cancer by administering a merciful injection, and has been battling her own demons—personified by Luke's blackmailing former nurse—ever since. If she looked into her new lover's rÇsumÇ, she'd see that she was due for all the punishment she craved, since Louis specializes in harrowingly realistic studies of martyrs' dying torments. Workaday suspense alternating with steamy soft-focus sex tableaux, by turns hypnotic and silly (``he could see through her skin to the subcutaneous structure of her body'')—like a more elaborately plotted version of Damage.