THE SECLUSION ROOM

THEY HAVE KILLED ME. Enter Detective William Moore. What he finds are a rash of threatening letters, two more suspected murders, several rapes, and the most bizarre group of suspects imaginable, among them a woman who believes the Mafia is shooting rays at her, a man whose tenuous grasp of reality has reduced him to complete ineptitude, his side­kick, who is incapable of distinguishing people from toilet paper, a man who speaks only in a mysterious tongue, a young man who believes policemen communicate by scratching their behinds, an alcoholic, a rapist, a catatonic minister, and a child abuser. Half of these people are also hospital staff. Moreover, the number-one suspect is a disheveled, morose man who has had brushes with the law before and who just happens to be a very dedicated and very good doctor called Abraham Redden. What it all adds up to is a fast, furi­ous, riotously funny tale of murder and intrigue, set in a place where the usual standards of sanity don t apply, where nothing is ever normal. More important, it is also a convincing portrait of real people trying to understand their responsibilities to each other, a remark­able evocation of the madness that is the modern-day psychiatric institution.