Barbara Vine's absorption with unnatural psychological states dominates her portrayal of Sandor, more deadly by far in his separation from reality than Joe. Sandor's keen mind seems somewhere to have slipped over the thin line to outright obsession, at once his perverse strength and his fatal weakness. Sandor's pursuit of Nina had begun long before, when he and others had kidnapped her for ransom in Italy.

The stories with which he hypnotizes Joe at last coalesce into the myth that has guided Sandor's actions ever since, the belief that he is a new Paris, abducting a Helen for whom he counts everything else in his warped world well lost. Sandor thinks nothing of slashing Joe gratuitously with a cutthroat razor when Joe, doglike, comes too close. But when Joe's adopted sister Tilly, one of Vine's most engaging grotesques, takes Sandor into her bed to seal their cooperation in...