Red Trance: *Signed*

Maddy Phillips, a blind and paraplegic forensic psychologist, and her brother Alex return for their third mystery, as Alex visits the new Russia and is unwittingly drawn into a murderous chain of events

From an island in northern Lake Michigan, a blind, paraplegic psychologist directs her hypnotized brother back through a recent trip to Moscow to solve murders he witnessed there. Improbable as Maddy and Alex Phillips may seem, Zimmerman ( Blood Trance ) gives his sleuthing siblings a kind of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction credibility, but the story is sabotaged by Alex's one-note narration (he's always frantic) and his failure to understand that his Russian friends, students when he last saw them, might set a different value on his friendship in post-Soviet society. Economic realities mix with surreal elements as Alex, in a trance, revisits the shooting death of his friend Lev and puzzles over the response of Lev's wife Tanya. Also figuring in Alex's vision are mafia figures, a widely popular TV hypnotist--an e-mail friend of Maddy's--and a shadowy figure, unidentified until the last pages. The reasons for, and perpetrators of, a stabbing and another shooting further bedevil Alex until his sister, with the erotically tinged influence she has over him, convinces him to face the truth.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.