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WAVEWALKER by Stella Duffy

WAVEWALKER

by Stella Duffy

Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 1996
ISBN: 1-85242-508-3
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail

Camberwell p.i. Saz Martin, last seen searching for a nameless woman (Calendar Girl, 1995), is on the trail again—this time digging dirt on one of the most famous psychotherapists in the world. The subject is Dr. Maxwell North, Harvard-trained guru to the rich and cuckoo, who's founded a worldwide chain of clinics dedicated to putting its clients through the Process, a total-immersion ordeal designed to wipe their souls clean of guilty memories, if it doesn't kill them first. For Max North's career path is littered with convenient suicides—a prized assistant, a former lover and her partner, an adoring acolyte who put himself through the Process ten times before crashing and burning. With so much virtually a matter of public record— especially since Duffy has been obligingly hopscotching between Saz's inquiries and Max's checkered past from the beginning- -where's the mystery? Not so much in Max's skullduggery as in the identity of Saz's client, identified only as Wavewalker. Is it Max's artist wife Caron McKenna, his daughter Jasmine De Vries, or Jake Epstein, resident offspring of Max's San Francisco branch? Armed only with the gift of gab, the lust stoked nightly by her newfound Bengali Baby Dr. Molly Steele, and a cast-iron frying pan (don't ask), Saz goes barely undercover in the establishments of Max and Caron, and discovers mainly that this gumshoe business can be hazardous to your health. Stylish but slight, with fewer lesbian interludes than Calendar Girl but nothing obviously making up for their absence.