The Fate Weaver: A Novel in Two Centuries

Though at times absorbing, this romantic suspense novel suffers from several major flaws, particularly a resolution that takes place completely offstage, wrapped up in a few pages of lackluster narration. A few major holes in the plot and motivation compound the weakness. Young American Joanna Lynne Latimer, living in London with her lover, a much older scholar, and writing a novel about the Black Death, receives a mysterious invitation from librarian Kate Callison to the village of St. Audric to study some original documentssee fix in final sentence from that period. Upon her arrival, Kate denies sending her the invitation, but Joanna decides to stay anyway, and begins to find strange parallels between her fictional creation and the history revealed in the local documents. She also discovers links in the local graveyard to her long-dead mother. Then the local squire tells her an astonishing truth about `revelation' in previous review her family. Phillips weaves in some fascinating historical material about the Black Death and pre-Christian rituals, and her novel-within-a-novel clearer about two sisters seeking safety from the plague shows promise (more so than its modern accompaniment), but these deft touches are not enough to vitalize the narrative. (May)