Author Description

From Library Journal Dorothea Ellison, the mysterious center of Doty's new novel, is one of the most evocative fictional characters this reviewer has ever encountered, and Doty draws her out slowly, carefully. Hers is a singular world, one she creates and controls, and anyone who enters it must become a part of it. Therefore, one is disappointed as the story unfolds. An elderly banker collapses on a New York street and is ostensibly discovered by Dorothea. Along with his son, Ben, we slowly learn of her involvement with the dying man. All other characters and the plot pale in the face of Dorothea's narration of her past and her movement through the novel. The work lacks integration and the story itself is not entrancing, but readers will follow Dorothea as she shifts among people and events that are mere props in the life she is perhaps inventing for Ben. What Dorothea sees in Ben, why his family disintegrates, how the stories Dorothea tells mesh with the plot are not sufficiently developed to make this a satisfying novel. Still, it is recommended for large fiction collections on the basis of the strong characterization of its central figure.- Joseph Levandoski, Free Lib. of PhiladelphiaCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description After his father collapses on the street, Ben Hastings becomes obsessed with the older woman who rescued him, and as he comes to know her better, he falls prey to a sinister attraction, which drains him of everything but his passion for her From Publishers Weekly Although haunted by the suicide of his sister, whose body he discovered floating in the pond of the family estate 20 years earlier, Ben Hastings, in his mid-30s, is happily married and a partner in his father's New York City investment firm. At the hospital where his father, J.L., lies unconscious after a stroke, Ben encounters beautiful Dorothea Ellison, who found J.L. collapsed on a sidewalk and now visits him daily and reads him po