cover image Amadoro

Amadoro

Vincent McConnor. Tor Books, $16.95 (279pp) ISBN 978-0-312-93041-7

Journalist Ashton Hendrie, hero of O'Connor's latest thriller (after I Am Vidocq ), receives a standing ovation when he gets to the office of Metropole Magazine , honoring his profile of psychic Sandra Saunders. The subject of his next assignment is Lyli Amadoro, nee Leola Martin, deemed the world's most beautiful woman, who heads a multinational company and is vastly rich and equally reclusive. She refuses to allow Hendrie to interview her but he begins to dig journalistic dirt anyway, aided by Saunders and a fellow psychic, among others who knew plain Leola Martin. Hendrie checks rumors of the accidental deaths of Lyli's three husbands and of her two children, kept out of sight and possibly mistreated. There are plenty of frights and crises in the mystery of a person like ``the strange woman'' warned against in the Bible, before Hendrie finishes his perilous assignment. (June)