Season of Shadows

From the opening 1966 royal wedding procession in the Himalayan kingdom of Patan, Mackey ( The Kindness of Strangers ) takes her two Radcliffe heroines through a complex, colorful saga of friendship and life passages. Lucy Constable, the future princess of Patan, nearly throws away her education in a passionate affair with free spirit David Blake, while best friend Cassie Quinn struggles to escape the influence of her famous botanist father and stumbles into love. When David abandons Lucy to live Kerouac-style, she finds solace in friendship with and eventual marriage to Prince Mila, but she discovers that life in Patan holds dangers. Meanwhile, her father's interference puts Cassie's marriage to fellow botany student Andy Rabinowitz at risk. When both marriages end, Lucy and Cassie reunite in 1968 as antiwar activists. They are implicated when a homemade bomb explodes, driving them underground together for 20 years. How friendship endures as the two women mature and find roles in society, and how their hard-won security is ultimately threatened, forms the substance of an engrossing and realistic story. (Mar.)