While I found this book absorbing and had difficulty putting it down, overall it didn't quite gel for me in the end. It has a lot of great elements: kidnapping, a serial killer/rapist, a possibly stolen manuscript, and (of course, being a Straub novel) an entire bed of lies and half-truths which our heroine must decipher. I did really like the protagonist, Nora Chancel; she's tough, smart, and resourceful, yet also human. The serial killer, too, was absolutely frightening, and whenever he was involved in a scene the tension kind of went off the charts. Most of the other characters, though, lacked a certain amount of depth and believability, and I felt some of them kind of got sold short by the author. It was hard to believe, for example, that Nora actually loved Davey, her whiny, ineffectual husband; in fact, it was hard to believe any real person could be as whiny, weak, and full of blame for others as he was. Probably there are people like him all over the place in real life, but this is fiction, and is thus supposed to make more sense than real life. ;) Davey wouldn't have been so egregious, though, if so many other characters weren't equally over-the-top.
In addition to the characters, there were also some plot problems, in that there was enough plot and intrigue for at least two different thrillers, and maybe Straub should have written two instead -- it was just awfully baroque. Straub often juggles a lot of plot twists with great aplomb, but in this case he doesn't quite manage it.