Vigorous characterization, a neatly tailored plot, and a sense of foreboding that rises with the accelerating pace of the story telling—all these are the hallmarks of a successful thriller. Rachel [protagonist of Summer of Fear], almost sixteen that June, was totally at peace with her responsive, loving family and with her boy-next-door romance. A long, happy summer stretched ahead. Then came the news that an aunt and an uncle had been killed in a mysterious single-car accident and that her seventeen-year-old cousin Julia—whom she didn't know—was coming to live with them. From a remote part of the Ozarks she came, a curiously mature-looking, ungrieving, inscrutable girl who immediately seemed to cast a spell over almost everyone…. Kindly old Professor Jarvis, an authority on the folklore of witchcraft, became [Rachel's] refuge; seriously he told her that the magic of modern witches was the "'the utilization of...