Pisces Rising

As she wheels into the parking lot of a big San Diego hospital, private detective Elizabeth Chase (Aquarius Descending, etc.) is filled with doubt about her psychic abilities. After all, she failed to foresee the fatal shooting of her beloved, a cop who quoted Poe. Still, Chase meets lawyer David Skenazy at the hospital. Skenazy's client, Bill Hurston, a former doctor who gambled away his practice and his marriage and is now recovering from an overdose of tranquilizers, is under guard because a bloody, scalped corpse has been found in his hotel room at the gambling casino on the Temecu Indian Reservation. Chase senses sadness in Hurston, not violence. She checks out the crime scene and psychically sees a dark figure fleeing from a closet carrying the hammer that he apparently used to murder Dan Aquillo, the casino's manager and a controversial local hero for bringing gambling to the reservation. That night, Chase gets badly beaten by an unidentified assailant. As she struggles toward consciousness, she sees the face of an Indian with long dark hair. Within days, she encounters the man, Sequoia, on the reservation. The cousin of her best friend, Sequoia is a shaman who admits to appearing to Chase in a spirit body. As Chase closes in on the killer, Sequoia appears at key moments to offer support and to urge her to expand the vision that comes to her naturally. While the telepathic angle that Lawrence works into this competent mystery seems gratuitous, her introduction of modern shamanism to her heroine's adventures is appealing and holds promise for more intriguing tales to come. Agent, Gina Maccoby. (Mar.)