Mask of the Night (G K Hall Large Print Book Series) - Hardcover

At the core of this spooky yarn, swaddled in Anne Ricean supernatural strands, is a concern half-concealed before in the author's Shadows from the Fire (1995)--the ugly tension between the sexes, in which women are the losers, big-time. Here, two women, 50 years apart, attract demonic lovers and amass ancient curses, while even their peripheral sisters-in-arms wilt like moths: ``Passion and injustice have a way of marking the very air around them and of reverberating down the years.'' From the time of an Inquisition in Venice comes the origin of this story of cruelty, terrible passion, and two artifacts belonging to an apostate priest who has turned to the occult: a gold ring and a silver mask, which appear and disappear in the lives of Desiree and Jenny. When English Jenny discovers the mask just before WW I, she braves the rage of Papa and the fears of Gramps to put it on her face. The world is then revealed as a ``terrible lonely place.'' There's more magic afoot when a strange man appears from nowhere, saying odd things. The grown-up Jenny goes on to endure a disastrous marriage to mundane Andrew; she's repulsed by sex and ``swamped by the ordinary.'' Andrew's sister Yvonne marries Theo, needy and vulnerable, it seemed, until his own strange metamorphosis. A ghastly climax ensues when all four meet, with Theo's hapless mother and sister, in his Irish estate, Kilashane. Kilashane, much later, is a personal mystery to Dee, who, in 1967, will also have eerie visitations there, even waver into a past and lose the gold ring she'd found. Kilashane is now a ruin, but who will tell Dee what caused this? She marries fascinating American Peter Eggli, who, at the last, murmurs that he will ``explain everything,'' as he places that gold ring on her finger. A bouquet of fleurs-de-mal and close-packed scary stuff; people and places not what they seem; promising escapes with dead ends, etc. Chilly con carne. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The newest novel by Ryan (Glenallen, LJ 2/15/93) is a complicated romantic thriller with supernatural overtones. Jenny and Dee, two young women living almost half a century apart, are linked by a gold ring and a strange mask. After Jenny's best friend, Yvonne, marries a crippled World War I veteran named Theo O'Reilly, it rapidly becomes clear that he is far more interested in Jenny, who is married, quite unhappily, to childhood sweetheart Andrew. Jenny is also haunted by strange dreams about a mysterious man who seems to possess her. Fifty years later, Dee, a secretary in Dublin, meets Peter, a big shot in a shadowy corporation who is bent on marrying Dee and taking control of the gold ring and mask she discovered as a child. Where did these artifacts really come from? Who is Theo O'Reilly? There are many twists and turns and subplots, but the ending is predictable and the writing style quite awkward. An optional purchase for comprehensive fiction collections.?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
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