THE SEDUCTION OF WATER

When Iris Greenfeder starts retelling the magic tale her mother used to tell her, she opens a Pandora's box containing false identities, missing jewels and manuscripts, and an old murder mystery . This intricately crafted novel plays out in a Catskills resort hotel in one busy summer. It's a satisfying thriller, carefully imagined and skillfully written. Christine Marshall's Iris is fine, but regrettably, the rest of her characterizations are cartoon-like. Her "bad" characters are far more obvious and unlikable than they would be on the page, which flattens the plot, and her idea of the speech of the cultured, elderly Harry Kron is ludicrous. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 03]