FINDING MARY BLAINE

Beautiful Blaine Anderson, who lives in a posh Austin, Tex., townhouse with her lawyer husband, Mark, seems to have it all. In reality, she's a timid trophy wife who's secretly terrified by city traffic, threatened by change and especially frightened that her possible pregnancy might further alienate the career-driven Mark. To find out if she really is pregnant, Blaine visits a women's free clinic, but while she's there, the clinic is bombed in an apparent act of anti-abortion terrorism. Blaine soon realizes that the bombing was an unfathomable attempt by Mark's senior partner to kill her. Unable to contact her husband without endangering him, the injured and bewildered Blaine lives among the homeless, and in doing so confronts her fears as well as a relentless killer. Thomas (The Widows of Wichita County , etc.) skillfully, and at times humorously, depicts the various street characters who assist Blaine, and she does an excellent job of portraying Mark's moving metamorphosis—with the help of an irresistibly eccentric old lady neighbor—from cold careerist to caring human being. By the book's end, the author has believably revitalized the dead-end relationship of two emotionally numbed people. Agent, Ruth Cohen. (Aug.)