Red Trance

From an island in northern Lake Michigan, a blind, paraplegic psychologist directs her hypnotized brother back through a recent trip to Moscow to solve murders he witnessed there. Improbable as Maddy and Alex Phillips may seem, Zimmerman ( Blood Trance ) gives his sleuthing siblings a kind of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction credibility, but the story is sabotaged by Alex's one-note narration (he's always frantic) and his failure to understand that his Russian friends, students when he last saw them, might set a different value on his friendship in post-Soviet society. Economic realities mix with surreal elements as Alex, in a trance, revisits the shooting death of his friend Lev and puzzles over the response of Lev's wife Tanya. Also figuring in Alex's vision are mafia figures, a widely popular TV hypnotist--an e-mail friend of Maddy's--and a shadowy figure, unidentified until the last pages. The reasons for, and perpetrators of, a stabbing and another shooting further bedevil Alex until his sister, with the erotically tinged influence she has over him, convinces him to face the truth. (July)