The Crightons

Priest, a young Britisher with a flair for finding quietly tantalizing sci-fi hypotheses, works some clever variations on the well-worn notions of the dream-world and alternate world. ""The perfect lover"" is an imaginary place--Wessex, product of a 1985 experiment in group illusion being conducted near Dorchester. The participants have been hypnotically projected into a ""future"" which has been laid out along general guidelines but then allowed to develop into the sum of their communal imaginings. Their unconscious bodies rest in elaborate life-support systems while they go about their Wessex lives sealed off from any memory of ""previous"" existence. The world they have made--an island cut off from England by the ""Blandford Passage"" and the ""Somerset Sea""--is a lovely resort, serenely divorced from Soviet England and its concerns. Four years into the project, a new director is brought in: Paul Mason, a cunning sociopath bent on reshaping the imaginative consensus on which the idyll of Wessex rests. Only two participants are able to resist his control: Julia Stretton, his former mistress, and her new lover David Harkman, who has developed a strange immunity to the post-hypnotic triggers which periodically withdraw the others from their trance. Priest develops his ingenious premise with unobtrusive grace, but somehow not with the thoroughness it deserves. The idea really demands a longer, slowermoving narrative with a larger weight of detail. Perhaps the chief flaw here is the character of Mason, a particularly flimsy cardboard villain where Priest's provocative design demands a figure of real menace.

Samantha Miller yearned to start a family, but eligible men were in short supply. Maybe visiting her happily married twin in England would help. Liam Connolly should have been relieved to see Sam set off for England. Since she'd been a gangly teenager, she'd had a crush on him. He'd managed to resist her as he'd felt her impetuous nature made them an unlikely match. So why, after she'd confessed the reason behind her trip, did he suddenly find he wanted to be the man to father her babies!

Katie Crighton has been persuaded to take her place in the family business, but she feels like an outsider, since most of her friends and family are in happy relationships—whilst Katie is a virgin. Sebastian Cooke's smoldering sexual energy is a dangerous temptation to Katie's innocence. He teases and tantalizes her until she can't resist him. They spend one perfect night together—and Katie is left wanting more...

Prominent lawyer Max Crighton has it all -- money, power, the perfect home life. But for a man add to the dark and dangerous side of sexual attraction isn't enough. He goes from affair to affair, seducing his grateful female clients, putting his charmed life-style at risk. Then his luck runs out. Max is brutally attacked. And the man who comes home from the hospital is a stranger to his wife, Maddy, to his children and to himself. Can Maddy trust this man who now desperately wants them to be a family? Should she believe that this perfect sinner has truly repented?