Night Games

Harris (The Portent, The Diviner has orchestrated another chilling tale in this story of Zoe Manning, wife and mother, who, at the age of 32, is still repressing memories of her painful childhood. Reliving the past is far from her mind as Zoe drops her husband and sons off at Boston's Logan airport for their one-week vacation, a time she has decided to keep for herself to clean up her deserted family home in New Hampshire. Leaving the airport she meets a former high-school classmate, cheerful, persuasive Mary Lisa, who urges her to join in a party for a theatrical troop at Mary's home in Marblehead that evening. Zoe reluctantly accepts, and slowly, with gradual awareness, she finds herself drawn into a horrifying week of bizarre bondage and captivity during which she experiences recurrent visions of the past: her innocent tryst with a young classmate; the chronic, drunken rages of her abusive father; the suicides of both of her parents. Is the grotesque group of actors basically malevolent or do they have another purpose in mind? And do they exist at all? The Zoe who picks up her family at the airport one week later is radically altered. This brisk novel is a heady mix of the psychological and the occult. (September 4)