Nightmare Point

Berry's ( Island Girl ) psychological thriller, although often intriguing, is marred by her failure to fully develop some critical plot twists. After her release from a psychiatric hospital where she received shock treatments to relieve her depression, Joyce Neuhauser vacations in Cape Cod with her husband and four children. There her 13-year-old daughter Debbie meets Ronnie Haddon, a man whom readers already know is dangerously unstable. Meanwhile, Joyce sees Ronnie driving a van; though she doesn't know who he is, he seems both familiar and disturbing, and she probes her unreliable memory and her dreams to come up with his identity. Shortly afterward, Ronnie kills a local woman; then he kidnaps Debbie, forcing her to call her parents to say she has eloped. Having remembered a past episode involving Ronnie, Joyce prods the police in their investigation, as Ronnie kills again. A final scene in a hurricane wraps up this layered, often suspenseful tale. It leaves the reader ultimately disappointed, however, because the important hinge between past and present dangers--Ronnie's prior association with Joyce and his sudden foray into murder--is left largely a coincidence. (Mar.)