The Good House.

by Tananarive Due Atria Books, September 2003 $25.00, ISBN 0-743-44900-2

In this melodramatic tale, Angela Toussaint, an entertainment lawyer and agent, is estranged from her tall, tan, ex-pro-jock hubby, Tariq. She travels from Los Angeles to Sacajawea, Washington, to summer in her maternal grandmother's bequest, the Good House. Angela was reared there by Gramma Marie after the death of Angela's mother, Dominique, whose truncated life was shredded by mental instability of--dark hints suggest--mysterious origin.

The prologue sets up the reader for a bad day at Good House, so there's little real suspense in the gradual revelation of sinister doings connected to the house and The Spot, a portion of the wooded, 60-acre property that has powerful erotic associations for our heroine. The challenge, then, is to make the environment a character, to give it history, presence, motive and movement. Due accomplishes this handily.

She has great patience with description and an eye for engaging minutiae, like the distinctive upholstery on a parlor chair: "the large cedar tree with a heart-shaped crater in its trunk."

Cavils aside, Due's a really good read now by any criterion, solid in novelistic conventions made bankable in earlier eras by Helen MacInnes, Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney. This new book puts Due, already winner of an American Book Award from the Before the Columbus Foundation, in the upper ranks of reliable, worth-your-money American popular novelist.