Glimpse

New Yorker Rain Thomas, the tormented heroine of this uneven supernatural thriller from bestseller Maberry (Ghost Road Blues), had sex for the first time at 15 with 18-year-old Noah, who shipped off to Iraq the next day. She later learned that she was pregnant and that Noah has died in an explosion. Under pressure, Rain gave up their baby for adoption. Years later, she still grieves for Noah and feels guilty about giving up the baby. Then things start to get really bad. She arrives early for a job interview, only to be told that she’s almost 24 hours late. Her disorientation at having blacked out and lost an entire day is compounded when she concludes that she hallucinated an encounter with an old woman who gave her a pair of glasses with a crack in one lens that have unusual properties: they allow her to see a boy who looks a lot like Noah. Maberry sympathetically depicts Rain’s struggle to maintain her sanity, but familiar genre material, including Rain’s battle with an evil figure whose name should not be uttered, soon overshadows the initially moving human story. (Mar.)