Mosaic - Hardcover

Maxim, John R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0380975440 ISBN 13: 9780380975440

Publisher: William Morrow, 1999

Synopsis

Major Roger Grayson's official investigation into two top-secret government experiments aimed at using Multiple Personality Disorder to create the perfect assassin leads him to the beautiful Susannah Card, a talented "mosaic" with the ability to control her separate personalities. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

John R. Maxim is the author of the bestselling series of Bannerman novels. He lives in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Reviews

Leave it to someone as clever as the author of Haven to come up with a crackerjack thriller premise based on MPD (multiple personality disorder). Dr. Norman Zales is the director of Project Chameleon, whose sinister experiment aims to produce a new breed of spies and assassins who can switch personalities from innocent bystander to stone- cold killer in no time. Under the direction of government agent Prentice Teal, Zales is using his female patients (almost all sufferers of MPD are female) as guinea pigs to create "mosaics"Apeople who can consciously control their metamorphoses into alternate personalities. Things come to a head when multitalented undercover agent Major Roger Grayson, who carries the physical and psychic scars of a near-fatal betrayal, is asked by a concerned general to investigate Zales and Teal. When an MPD patient commits a shocking crime, the subsequent coverup leads Grayson to the corrupt center of the experiment, a mental health research center, where young female victims of the insidious psychiatric network fight for their lives. At the heart of the labyrinthine mystery is a 10-year-old with near-miraculous powers and a reclusive woman called Susannah Card, both of whom are natural mosaics. Also participating in the fracas are some vengeful neo-Nazis, creepy fathers who've abused their daughters and then committed them to the institution (getting off scot-free as the girls become "turnips"), and a clever romantic triangle with only two people. Maxim's complex plot bounces from APA lingo to computer hacking clues to the murderous/amorous conversation between one woman's two personalities, culminating in a tense climax. As in Haven, Maxim uses the conventions of comedy and farceAmistaken identity, chance encounters, shifts of allegiance and a deus ex machinaAto exhilarating effect. This is top-notch thriller with a clever premise and equally proficient meditations on identity and character.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A hodgepodge of a thriller about secret government experiments aimed at turning Multiple Personality Disorder into a positive. Major Roger Grayson is terrific at going undercover to penetrate noxious organizations. Among other sociopathic roles, he's played the vicious redneck and the ruthless neo-Nazi to great disruptive advantage. But now he's called upon to accept a sea change of an assignment: helping evaluate the mysterious effort overseen by pop psychologist Norman Zales at Belfair, a sort of gothic hideaway for MPDs. If the government-sanctioned experiments taking place there prove out, the nation will be able to field an enhanced breed of espionage agent. Consider: an agent is captured. She (virtually all MPDs are female) proceeds to frustrate the daylights out of her interrogators by a nifty shift of personality . . . Mata Hari into Orphan Annie, for instance. Or so goes the theory. Grayson is skeptical. He's also not sure he qualifies as the right person to do the evaluating. Nor does he understand why it's so important to the general, his boss, that he take the job. And when he begins to encounter bad guys, he's puzzled by what they're after. Grayson just cant fathom what's really going on at Belfair, or who's being kept there. Hes sent to track down Susannah, a naturalthat is to say, a multiple with push-button control over her contrasting cast of personalitiesbut he's not sure why. And neither is the reader. But after the big, bloody finish, we do know that the survivors are the good guys. Since some of them may be MPDs, however, the difficulty lies in counting noses. You need a scorecard to tell the Emmas from the Veronicas from the Theresas, and so on. And a really strong commitment to want to do it. This capable veteran has done better (Haven, 1997, etc.). -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0380975440
• ISBN 13: 9780380975440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384