Finishing Touches

Making good on his reputation for sensual tales of terror (Nightwalker, Phantom, Tessier's new novel is seductive and compulsively readable. The plot is an ingenious metaphor for the '80s zeitgeist, with the power and self-indulgence of business and economics translated into terms of sex and physical control over others' lives. Young American doctor Tom Sutherland is on an extended vacation in London when he meets wealthy, enigmatic plastic surgeon Roger Nordhagen and his assistant, Eurasian beauty Lina Ravachol. While Nordhagen grooms Tom as his successor, Lina shows him a world of erotic, amoral pleasure he had never imagined. Tessier is particularly good at depicting the transition from repugnance to acceptance to participation in acts of casual terror. If the novel turns diffuse and mystic at the end, it has by then drawn the reader into a remarkable complicity with its characters. (March)