Trance State

John Case is the pen name of husband-and-wife writing team Jim and Carolyn Hogan, whose earlier novels, The Genesis Code and The First Horseman, became bestsellers. This is another gripping thriller which rockets along at an exhilarating pace. Adrienne Cope is a bright young attorney, working round the clock for her boss with her eye on promotion. Her sister, Nikki, has been seeing a therapist, Jeff Duran, who is recovering horrific memories of Satanic abuse and murder from her childhood. When Nikki kills herself, Adrienne is determined to ruin Duran, convinced he is responsible for Nikki's suicide. But Duran is not who he seems. His own memories are unfamiliar and disjointed; tantalizing glimpses of a past he cannot remember infiltrate his daily life - the smell of the ocean, the taste of rum, chess games in the burning sun of Haiti. When Adrienne erupts into his life, accompanied by private eye Eddie Bonilla, she has gathered enough information to destroy his reputation. But someone else is after Duran, and after Bonilla is killed in a violent shoot-out in Duran's apartment the mismatched pair find themselves on the run. But who is after them, and who is being targeted - Adrienne or Duran? As the chase hots up, the revelations come thick and fast. When Ray Shaw, a psychiatrist with a special interest in unusual memory conditions, agrees to look at Duran's case, the horrific truth about his past is finally uncovered. The trail leads to Switzerland, where Gunnar Opdahl, Director of the Institute of Global Studies, is poised to bring about death and destruction on a cataclysmic scale. Mind control is usually regarded as the stuff of science fiction, but this novel is so convincing that the idea of ruthless scientists having the power to interfere with memory becomes frighteningly possible. This is definitely a thriller with an edge: disturbing and at times violent, it's a chilling reflection on the nature of evil, and the lengths unscrupulous individuals will go to in their search for ultimate power. (Kirkus UK)