The Fault Tree

211 pages. Octavo (8 1/2" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's quarter beige cloth with gilt lettering to spine over red boards in original pictorial jacket. First edition. Marina Robinson, a top investigator with ""Breakdown, Inc."" in California (""we're engineers who investigate why things go wrong""), is hard at work on a challenging case: Why did the Loopy Doop ride collapse at Fun World? Was there negligence in maintenance--or some weakness in the metal itself? Then, however, Marina becomes increasingly distracted from her work--when she starts receiving cryptic notes, even a blurry phone call, from her younger sister Catherine in India. . .who's been dead for ten years! Could Catherine somehow be alive, despite evidence that she died in an ashram fire? Marina must find out--so, dropping the Loopy Doop case, she's off to Bombay, as flashbacks start to fill in the 1970s story: Catherine's involvement in a quasi-Hindu, serpent-worshipping cult; Marina's trip to India to bring Catherine back; the riot of locals against the heretical cult--ending in the ashram fire and the reported suicide of sexy cult-leader Nagarajan (who seduced Marina too). Meanwhile, in present-day Bombay, guilt-ridden Marina tries to track down the source of those letters and phone-calls--with help from young Indian Vijay, a prim watchdog from the nervous American Embassy. Their sleuthing soon suggests that cult-leader Nagarajan may still be alive; in fact, Marina and Vijay (budding lovers) are then kidnapped by Nagarajan's criminal gang. And finally, after a showdown and shootout with evil, charismatic Nagarajan, Marina can return home--without Catherine or Vijay, but with her old sexual guilts exorcised. . . and still be in time to explain the Loopy Doop disaster, fingering the culprit who sent her on the India wild-goose chase. An odd, half-satisfying blend of hackneyed romantic-suspense, tinny psychology (serpentine phallic symbols, etc.), and okay mystery--with some of the charm (if little of the humor) that made Friedman's mystery-debut, Hurricane Season, such an offbeat winner. Condition: A very good copy in a near fine jacket.