CHAIN REACTION

Feature writer Alexandra Bridgman—sent by Chronicle Magazine to write a story on the aftermath of a rockslide that killed 15 in the French village of Carriac—meets a universal hostility deeper than simple reluctance to talk to the press about personal disasters. Even her lodgings with romance writer Mary Corton and her harmlessly vain husband Georges are marked by tension, as Mary asks her to try to draw out her son, Neville Johnson, wheelchair-bound and mute since his fruitless attempt to rescue hunchbacked Petit Louis from the calamity. Meanwhile, Jordan (The Deadly Side of the Square, 1991, etc.) drops hints via Neville's boyhood friends Derek Blackwood and Pierre Chervas about what Neville and Petit Louis were really doing when the roof fell in—hints most readers will pick up long before attractive Alex. Genuinely interesting characters are wasted in this remake of Bad Day at Black Rock on the Dordogne, with the dire secret revealed even earlier.