Killing the Rabbit

Even for a suspense thriller protagonist, Goodman's Hannie Reynard encounters some seriously grisly stuff—and that's before she even leaves the bathroom. The heroine, an Australian documentary filmmaker, suffers from Crohn's disease, a chronic, incurable bowel disorder that can be, well, pretty gross (“She had hunched on the cold toilet for fifteen minutes, pushing out small globules of mucus and blood”). But illness doesn't deter her from aggressively pursuing her latest project, a film about young women considered medical “freaks”; Hannie's real problem is that her interview subjects are being mysteriously evasive. When they start dropping dead, Hannie and her partner, Mosson Ferret, a bean counter from the Independent Film Fund, are unwittingly thrown into the midst of a murderous international plot. Meanwhile, Hannie's got a dark secret to protect that, if revealed, could jeopardize her career and her budding romance with Mosson; Mosson, meanwhile, has a secret of his own he's trying to keep. Unfortunately, Goodman spends too much time with the minutiae of her (admittedly vivid) characters to deliver much suspense, which may leave readers with a chronic case of the snoozes. (Aug.)