Mirage - Softcover

The Wilson-Costello team turns out a medical thriller about memory that echoes the wonderfully trashy psychological suspense of Hitchcock's Spellbound updated as a computer game. This is Wilson's second novel featuring female twins in peril (Sibs, 1991), while novelist Costello's The 7th Guest is the bestselling CD-ROM interactive drama of all time. Here, neurophysiologist Julie Gordon, 27, and a fellow doctor have devised a virtual reality scanner that can enter a patient's memory and record it visually on a VCR while a guide hooked up to the scanner also enters and participates in the patient's memories. Julie's an intellectual cold fish, friendless and loveless, but when her overemotive twin sister Samantha falls into a mysterious coma in Paris, Julie decides to enter Samantha's memory and try to locate the missing neural pathway that has shut down Samantha's conscious mind. Samantha's memories focus on traumatic events leading up to her coma, but the memories themselves are often symbolic visualizations that have to be interpreted by Samantha's shrink, Dr. Alma Evans, who both watches the visualizations in progress on the VCR monitor and later reviews them on tape. The central event in the twins' memories is the house fire in which their parents died--a fire the twins witnessed when they were five. If parts of that horror have been blocked from recall, has their sudden eruption caused Samantha's coma? The twins were raised by their father's brother, warm, fatherly Eathan, who, as their guardian, supervises their $2 million insurance inheritance and trust fund. When Julie discovers that Eathan was also their father's twin, the game's afoot. Samantha's lover, Liam O'Donnell, pursued by Scotland Yard (he may be an Irish terrorist), shows up. Then Dr. Evans, having untangled the symbolic knot of twins upon twins, dies under very suspicious circumstances. If this isn't movie-bound, Hollywood needs a brain transplant. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Novelist Wilson (The Select) and CD-ROM scriptwriter Costello (The 7th Guest) take the reader on a high-tech voyage to the brain centers of human memory in this vivid cyber-medical thriller. Julie Gordon, a 28-year-old New York neurophysiologist, is pulled away from a breakthrough research project investigating memory via virtual reality technology when she gets an anxious call from her uncle in France. Her estranged twin sister, Samantha, has fallen into an unexplainable coma and seems to be dying, though she does not have a discernible illness. Julie agrees to use "memoryscape," the spectacular computer program she helped create, to search the minefield of her sister's memory. As Julie already knows, both sisters' history is irrevocably scarred by visions of the tragic house fire that killed their parents 23 years ago. But even more secrets haunt the pair. Now, returning to England with Sam and her uncle in a desperate effort to help her sister recover, the secrets Julie didn't know are revealed. Ultimately, Julie's entire identity is called into question as she confronts the possibility that the twins' careful liberal education may have been an elaborate experiment on the human brain. The virtual reality sequences in the novel provide stunningly surreal images, compensating for a plot steeped in melodrama. Although the revelatory conclusion may disappoint some readers as too contrived, others may see it as shocking, and most will be entertained by the med-tech details along the way.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.