Thief of Souls

In this disappointing thriller from the author of Bone Deep and Criminal Seduction, Dan Behr, a 30-year-old junior architect at a big Manhattan firm, learns from a violent, ultra-conservative cult that his family and home life are not as they seemed. On a Sunday, Dan drives from his office into Greenwich Village to pick up his psychologically fragile wife, Alex, a woman so devastatingly beautiful she has been ""haunted all her life by her own image."" To his shock, he learns that Alex, whom he assumed was at a three-day spiritual retreat, was in fact participating in a brainwashing session. Now she is under guard in an armed compound and refuses to speak to him. As Dan struggles ineffectually to free her from her slavish enthrallment to a fundamentalist cult called the Ark, Alex takes the family car, withdraws all their savings, maxes out their credit cards and abandons their young daughter, Hana. When cult members abduct the little girl, Dan infiltrates the Ark, facing the same tactics that have paralyzed the will of so many others. North's prose is often clumsy, and her plot strains credulity. Even so, her depiction of cult psychology and of ritualistic secret evils is scary, even fascinating, and her brisk pacing and dire scenario will tug readers along. The novel's great weakness, though, is its protagonist, who seems so oblivious to the facts of his own life and to those around him that it's hard to cheer his metamorphosis from everyman to hero. 60,000 first printing. (Mar.)