WITCHLIGHT

Another psychic/occult case for Truth Jourdemayne (Ghostlight, 1995), though here the main character is former Wall Street high- flyer Winter Musgrave, who, though she's discharged herself from a psychiatric clinic, can remember little of her past and seems to be haunted by a destructive poltergeist with an affinity for electrical power. Winter finds herself in Glastonbury, New York, near the Bidney Institute, where Truth and Dr. Dylan Palmer pursue their psychic and magick researches. Winter is astonished to discover that she herself attended college there 14 years ago; she also joined the Nuclear Circle, a group that attempted to duplicate the magick rituals described by Truth's father. But even Truth can't stop the poltergeist—actually a horribly dangerous, artificially created Elemental that feeds by torturing animals—but who sent it, and why? In her attempt to recover her memories and track down the source of the Elemental, Winter contacts the other members of the Circle: Janelle, now a failed artist married to a brute; Ramsey, a down-at-the-heels, much-divorced used-car salesman; Cassie, killed in a mysterious fire surely set by the Elemental; and finally Hunter Greyson, once Winter's lover, rejected by her upper-crust parents, who's now in a coma following a traffic accident, and whom Winter must meet on the astral plane in order to find the truth. Less than fully beguiling—the ending is notably weak and anticlimactic—but much improved over Ghostlight, with better characters, a believable plot, some gripping incidents, and a minimum of dangling threads.