The Art of Breaking Glass (Signed First Edition)

When psychiatric nurse Sharon Blautner inadvertently helps patient Bill Kaiser escape from New York's Bellevue Hospital, she is torn between stopping him and allowing the modern day Robin Hood to continue his twisted efforts on behalf of the city's powerless. 200,000 first printing. $300,000 ad/promo.

Imagine Hannibal Lecter with a social conscience, and you'll have the germ of Hall's diabolically sharp new thriller. Bill Kaiser is a man with a mission: He wants a Manhattan day-care center installed in the decaying Carnegie-Hayden building so much that he's willing to kill the project's opponents. Captured by the police after planting a bomb in sanctimonious Senator Arvin Redwell's high-rise, Bill fakes insanity convincingly enough to get committed for three days' observation in Bellevue, where he puts on such a winning (though demented) front that psychiatric nurse Sharon Blautner starts to open up to him. But Bill is determined to continue his campaign, so he manages to get the unwitting Sharon to smuggle in an innocuous-looking package that's filled with the goodies he needs to engineer a spectacular escape. Naturally, Sharon's accused of complicity in Bill's escape and fired from her job. Even worse, she sees that Bill's appointed himself her personal avenging angel, meting out condign justice to the randy surgeon who liked his sex rougher than she did and to the sniveling bureaucrat who fired her as he warms up for the coup de grace: going after Edward Mackinnon, the treacherous onetime partner who stole Sharon's father's business and drove him to suicide--the same Edward Mackinnon who just happens to be the megabucks developer who plans to turn Carnegie-Hayden into a maximum security prison. Nothing of Mackinnon's, it seems, is safe from Bill's high-tech wizardry and homespun moralizing, and as Bill scores triumph after triumph over this robber baron, Sharon, who's working with the FBI, finds herself wondering whose side she's really on. The final payoff, though ingenious, isn't up to the rest of this exhilarating yarn from Hall (Nightmare Logic, not reviewed). But for most of its length, it really does manage to make its villain both scary and unsettlingly appealing. (First printing of 200,000; $300,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hall's novel is one of the best--if not the best--thrillers of the year. It sizzles with tension and delivers a pithy, provocative plot, more rough-and-tumble action than an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, a devilish touch of black humor, a superbly crafted cast of characters who are as appealing as they are paradoxical, and a slam-bang ending. Sharon Brautner is a nurse in the psych ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Still reeling from a horrifying personal tragedy, she spends all her emotional energy on her patients. When Milt Slavitch is admitted, suffering from delusions and bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, Sharon at first writes him off as just another nutcase. But the more she talks with Milt, the more she realizes he's quite different from the usual Bellevue crazies. For starters, Milt Slavitch isn't his real name. It's only one of the dozens of aliases he uses. And he's not exactly nuts. He's a passionate, brilliant, multitalented eccentric with a grand plan to change the world--a plan that will eventually encircle Sharon and force her to confront some of the most difficult questions she's ever faced. Look for Breaking Glass to climb the best-seller lists and hit the big screen in short order. Emily Melton

Wealthy entrepreneur Edward Mackinnon wants to purchase a prestigious New York City building and transform it into the first private, for-profit prison. The fact that it will displace hundreds of New York City's lower-middle-class citizens and destroy a community is not his concern. Enter Bill Kaiser, a brilliant, charming psychotic with his own idea of justice. After planting a bomb in one of the developer's apartments, Bill mutilates himself in an attempt to avoid arrest, which lands him in a psychiatric hospital. There he meets Sharon Blauntner, a psychiatric nurse who reveals to Bill her secrets and desire for vengeance. Bill incorporates Sharon into a repertoire of worthy causes and imagines a nonexistant relationship between them. Hale's novel is an enthralling, action-filled story of a killer's twisted conception of love and justice. Highly recommended for most libraries.?Georgia Panos, Johnson Cty. Lib. System, Leawood, Kan.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.