Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 5, 1993 TAG: 9312130298
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JUDY KWELLER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
STORM SURGE. By T.J. MacGregor. Hyperion. $19.95.
Take a beautiful, brilliant, sensual, spiritual young blonde.
Name her Tari Jones. Get her romantically involved with an incredibly sexy movie star and a mystical, ascetic Roman Catholic priest/spychiatrist. Oh, and have her perform a few miracles, too, while she's doing rounds during her medical psychiatric internship in a Miami Hospital. (Did I mention she's in premed?)
Have her escape being committed to a psychiatric hospital by two semievil yet misguided professors. Have the priest rescue her from them and the movie star rescue her from everyone ... but not before she writes a book that God dictates to her as the self-proclaimed daughter of God. But wait, there's more! It turns out that she's the lovechild of a Roman nobleman who announces that she will receive the family legacy of $2 billion plus.
Are you offended yet? Well, if you're not offended by sacrilegious overtones of Pat Booth's ``All For Love,'' then you should be put off by its mediocrity as a novel. But I will say this: If anything could save ``All For Love,'' it has to be the wonderfully erotic sexual episodes. Those, at least, are excellent.
``Storm Surge,'' on the other hand, excels in dust jacket copy, possibly the best ever written. It promises a steamy, pulse-pounding murder mystery as hot and electrifying as the Miami air. But the novel itself is ponderous, convoluted and unrealistic, featuring the decidedly unexciting husband-wife team of Quinn St. James and Mike McCleary. They can't even resolve their conflicts with each other and their roles with their young daughter. How can they be expected to solve a mystery?
And what a mystery. You need a scorecard to keep track of which forgettable character is doing what to whom. Author T.J. MacGregor can't even seem to get a fix in this hurricane of plot lines on which characters are good and which are evil. Then, afer the novel has already skittererd off in too many strange directions, the titular storm arrives and, if possible, the mystery becomes even more unweildy and far-fetched.
Judy Kweller is vice president of an advertising agency.
by CNB