BLOOD TRANCE

When she gets a letter from her agoraphobic former patient Loretta Long begging for help in ``a matter of life and death,'' blind, paraplegic hypnotist/psychologist Maddy Phillips (Death Trance, 1992) sends her brother Alex to Chicago to help Loretta. Alex is too late to prevent the murder of Loretta's stepmother, Helen, and Loretta's confession to the police, but his hypnosis-induced memories of his nightmarish visit—most of the novel is a series of shrill flashbacks—help untangle the web of relationships among Loretta, her runaway alcoholic brother Billy, his twin Carol Marie, and Ray Preston, another patient Maddy had been treating for depression after his daughter was killed in a car accident. Zimmerman's tight focus on a tiny cast—whose shifting positions seem to be refracted through a kaleidoscope—comes across like Ruth Rendell on uppers after a sleepless night. The sustained note of hysteria keeps your blood pumping while preventing you from taking any of it seriously.