KEY WEST

Cameron, who moved from romance paperbacks to romantic-suspense hardcovers with French Quarter (1998), changes her setting from New Orleans to Key West to tell the story of young Sonnie Keith Giacano, a tennis widow married to ever-away star Frank Giacano. The self-centered Frank (babies bore him), now in his 12th year on the circuit (he usually wipes out early at Wimbledon), has been away for two months without a single call to Sonnie. She’s in her fifth month of pregnancy when he phones her somewhat mysteriously, saying he’ll be flying in. But when Frank’s brother, Romano, says Frank has been kidnaped, perhaps by Italian terrorists, Sonnie apparently goes berserk (or actually has been set up for murder), drives into a wall, and suffers cuts and scarring, a miscarriage, and amnesia. She tries to regain her memory yet clearly suppresses something terrifying. Maybe a violent Key West hurricane will help jog her memory? She signs on ex-detective Chris Talon to find out whether she’s a wife or a widow. Despite rather endless arguing between them, in large part because Sonnie feels she’s lost her mind and can—t be understood by anyone, the two grow cozy while trying to discover what happened to Frank, with a backdrop of evocatively depicted Key West haunts. Cameron keeps the suspense fairly high, but one feels the romance writer spinning and spinning out the scenes after the plot starts moving.