Intimate Betrayal

The adage, ""more is better"" doesn't ring true in Hill's latest (after Deceptions). Since the age of 15, after witnessing the violent deaths of her parents, Reese Delaware has suffered from repressed-memory amnesia. Now, as a writer on assignment with Visions Magazine to do a major piece on computer ""wonder boy"" Maxwell Knight, something triggers her memory. When she learns that both their fathers worked for military intelligence, she realizes that her past and Max's are dangerously and irrevocably intertwined. There's so much crammed between the covers of this book--Max's disastrous affair with Reese's white half-sister, government cover-ups, computer program thefts, a corporate take-over, Max's displaced parentage and a deadly deceit resulting from an unrequited love affair between Reese's father and her mother's sister--that's it's difficult to keep up. Add a dizzying array of characters, pages of overwritten narrative (""Maxwell's dark sweeping eyes roamed caressingly over the suits of Samurai regalia"") and redundant referrals to Reese's milk-chocolate body parts, and the reader might find this story too overburdened to be enjoyable. (May)